I agree with this. In retrospect, a better path for me would've been (in The Netherlands):
- Don't do pre-university in high school but prepare for "higher job education" in high school. Graduate at 17.
- Do a "higher job education", speed it up (instead of 4 years do 3 years) and graduate at 20. Do some web dev/UX-based degree (they exist and speedups are possible, provided you're pro-active).
- Get a job grind away for 3 to 5 years, learn about investing and invest most of the money.
- If you want to go deeper in computer science, because the craft is beautiful then follow a master degree in security.
I'd have missed out on a lot of spiritual/some social development that I wouldn't have gotten at "higher job education" but did get at uni (as I did that for 6 months, a different degree though). However, compared to that, I now have a career setback of 7 years.
Assuming you're Dutch, but in the context of this article, HBO is college as well (the very clear distinction between applied universities and research universities doesn't exist
in the Americas).
A short (and hence inaccurate) overview of the apprenticeship system for the trades in my country:
Apprentices start working one day a week and going to school four. They end up working four days a week and going to school one. Apprentices can switch to a more academic track, at a technical school or university, if they get the desire.
When they finish with their apprenticeship, not only do they already have horizontal ties with their classmates, but they also have vertical ties with their business, its clients, and the master tradesmen who conducted the classroom component and oversaw the theoretical and practical exams.
Well you can't become a surgeon or a lawyer unless you switch a university track at some point. But you can definitely work in the medical or legal field by doing an apprenticeship first and moving on to a 2-3 year professional degree (for instance nurse school isn't college here).
>Well you can't become a surgeon or a lawyer unless you switch a university track at some point.
"Can't" because those are the rules we've established. But both of those professions seem like they be perfect for apprenticeships (they were at one point in history). It's not like studying the literature isn't or can't be a part of apprenticeship curriculum.
Any skilled trade that's highly dependent on outdoor work and physical labor, in the absence of free health care, economic safety net, and strong labor laws.
I've dealt with a lot of trades people, and the ones who are my age (mid 50s) tend to be hobbling and broken. On the other hand I could see it work for things like the "lesser" health care trades such as dental hygienist.
I never said the degree was a benefit itself! Just that it might satisfy "Most successful people have X"
(Although, here in the UK at least, the quality of degrees genuinely does vary by university in a way that roughly corresponds to their rankings. I know that's an unfashionable observable but I have seen enough degree programs at different universities to know it's likely true unless I happen to have seen an atonishingly unrepresentative sample. Partly this is self fulfilling because lower ranked universities are forced to take less good students and the level of the programme has to be adjusted accordingly, but part of it really is to do with quality of teaching.)
Bollocks. Ph.Ds don't mean much unless you want to do research and provide cheap labor for 5 years.
I'd say a Master's is the new BA/BS. With everyone getting an undergrad degree via online schools, or via 6+ years of undergrad college, it's ability to filter is weak. A brick-and-mortar Master's serves as a way to differentiate from that pack; I'm not sure what an online Master's equates to.
Maybe an online master's will actually be a better filter than brick-and-mortar? I'd say it takes more fortitude to stick with an online program and finish it, so at some point maybe 'online' won't be a pejorative, it'll be a bragging point.
A PhD only signals that you have an unhealthy relationship with academia.
I've interviewed and worked with so many PhD from top tier schools and it's astounding to me that someone can spend 6+ years studying a quantitative science, at a school like MIT or Harvard and still not have a basic understanding of statistics, and worse be incapable of genuinely understanding any of the quantitative tools they used for years.
The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research, they simply know how to mechanically replicate the processes you need to survive in academia today.
Another thing with a PhD is that it is no guarantee that you'll even be hireable. I know of a number of PhD candidates who have trouble interacting in a professional setting outside of the of 'I deserve deference because I have a PhD, you don't necessarily even deserve respect' mentality.
I find sometimes a PhD can come with very ingrained attitude issues. I recall working for a company with a new-recruit development program where really the only way to fail out was through attitude issues. One of the people who oversaw the program mentioned that she's only ever seen people with PhDs and higher fail out over this issue.
I wonder if the same people would have failed out of any job requiring human interaction. One thing graduate education does is attract people who know that they would struggle in a mainstream work environment for whatever reason. Some are outright crazy.
Quite possibly. I do know it's common to the point of being a trope that some graduate students are just in graduate school to defer having to enter the work-force. Some see it as a way to put off having to make major decisions or processes like job hunting. Not like there's no real reason some opt to do things like that. It is markedly easier to accept scholarships and do the grad school circuit than find a job if you have mid to high grades.
I'm surprised to read a comment like this. It seems like an incredibly harsh generalization. I know plenty of PhDs who have a good relationship with academia, or even no relationship.
I also think it's unrealistic to expect PhDs to have a "basic understanding of statistics" unless they specifically studied it. I would be shocked and dismayed to see a PhD statistician misunderstand basic statistics; I wouldn't blink if a PhD mathematician or physicist made basic statistical errors. It's hard enough to achieve research-level mastery of one domain in five years, and many mathematicians and physicists (most?) do not need stats.
If you're talking about fields like psychology or sociology, I personally disagree with the expectations they're held to. I believe we would have less of a reproducibility crisis if research projects had statistician coauthors and peer reviewers, rather than just PhDs for whom statistics is not a core competency. That would be fairer and more realistic.
Finally, to be blunt it's hard for me to take this comment seriously when you say something like this:
> The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research
A PhD degree does generally prove expertise in whatever the subject of your dissertation was and provides access to a couple of networks. Not always guaranteed, but if someone has a PhD I generally expect that they are at least competent at whatever their dissertation was about. And I've only been burned once.
The value of the expertise & set of networks, though, can range from "extraordinarily valuable" to "worse than useless".
In STEM fields the expertise & network is usually at least good enough to keep you busy with decent-paying work for a career or so.
In CS it's usually good enough to get you either a 100K job with lots of freedom or a regular old 300K job at a big tech. So, not really worth doing if your goal is just maxing out lifetime earnings, but certainly there are worse outcomes. From there you're on your own, though.
A PhD degree doesn't "prove" anything. It's a chance for you to build your own education using the resources at your disposal, under a mentor. There is vastly too much variability in the experiences of PhDs, even within any single field, to generalize. This makes it difficult to market the PhD as a credential or meal ticket. It's a license to compete, that's all. And as you can read in this forum, it's held against you by a lot of people.
Luckily, I knew this when I started my PhD program, because of an oversupply of mentors and role models within my own family. Also, I was planning on carving out my own niche anyway because I'm a punk. But it's not for the faint of heart.
Still, I'm skeptical about modifying PhD education to turn it into a "credential" that comes with an employment guarantee. Part of academic freedom is the freedom to study something that nobody cares squat about. Also, many of the people who are attracted to doing that, are unlikely to prosper in a mainstream career anyway.
For myself, I realize that becoming a programmer after high school might actually have been better from a lifetime earnings standpoint, but it assumes that I would actually have survived an entry level job in a code factory or IT department.
Having your parents fund your startup and getting all their friends to support you until you hit critical mass where you don't need their help anymore.
People always parrot this but how many Doctors do you know with no degree? Take a poll at Google engineers and see how many are actually self taught and have no degree. How many Wall Street bankers/traders/etc have no degree? How many US Senators have no degree? How many World Leaders in history have had no formal education? Not counting dropouts, what percentage of Billionaires have no college education? The reality is still that the overwhelming majority of "successful" people still have degrees. You can argue what the root of this is whether it's the added knowledge or signalling of the degree, or intrinsic self motivation of the person, etc. but that fact still remains.
> You can argue what the root of this is whether it's the added knowledge or signalling of the degree, or intrinsic self motivation of the person, etc. but that fact still remains.
More discussion on "the root of this" might lead to the above changing.
How do you get enough experience for employers in said field to take a chance on you? It's all about getting over that initial hurdle of 100% unexperienced.
And that do all fields have budget places where you can work in for peanuts? Are all fields of the "just figure it out on the job" variety? Software is a weird bubble, but are all industries able to do that?
Yeah, for the most part. You have to get your foot in the door. Usually by having a family member or friend give you a leg up. There are few professions that have some sort of on-the job learning for the inexperienced that can be replaced by college. Especially at the BS/BA level.
If you don't have that foot in the door you are usually spending a few years working for "Exposure" or "Networking opportunities." Sometimes for minimum wage or less. Unless the job is so hard that it's constantly churning workers. I'm sure a lot of jobs will take you off the street with no experience, but they will be dangerous and/or unpleasant.
Naturally when generalizing there will be exceptions. But that was essentially the rule when I got out of college. 2+ years experience prerequisite for most "Entry-Level" positions.
I think we should bring back the guild system. Start a job as an apprentice, mentor with a journeyman, progress your way up, mentor apprentices while learning from others higher up, gain sufficient knowledge to build your masterpiece, graduate as a master in your field, mentor journeymen. Move on.
As someone who came into the industry through the vocational track this is interesting.
But it is confusing are 8th Light acting as a source of training for other companies or just internal use.
How many years is it 4 / 5 what certification do you get at the end?
Why are you using "trade" terminology normally those doing "advanced apprenticeship" where associate professions and calling us "apprentices" would have got you a hard look.
when I did mine in the UK I was a Junior member of the IMECHE on the path way to full chartered (PE) membership
It does seem a bit light how long is the apprenticeship
If FANG companies where serious about training / diversity this is what they should be doing take bright high school kids at 18/19 and sign them up for a proper 4/5 year apprenticeship.
You mean you can't have lower level people working on bug fixes and small tasks while you save bigger more difficult work for more advanced people? Who says they won't be productive? What is your measure of productivity?
I'm talking about the fact that hiring managers expect applicants to have 100% of the listed skills for any position because their corporations would rather spend money on stock buybacks than employee training.
Maybe this is one area where legislation can help enforce a social norm. Corporate training used to be practiced at prior generations of generations- IBM, GE, HP, etc. With corporate profits at the levels at they are today, Big Tech can afford to spend a little more on expanding internship and training opportunities.
I wouldn't know, I'm just a high school dropout, but if they barrier of entry to getting into a PhD "guild-system" is to also go through Associates, Bachelor, and Master degree, then I don't think its worthwhile for 90% of jobs that only require technical mastery.
Ph.D's get paid a pittance relative to what they do... and for like 3-5 years.
Apprenticeships for things like plumbers and electricians pay a decent wage interspersed with education.
On the long term a Ph.D may do better than a Master Electrician, but in the short term it's a way better deal. My friend out of HS who started working for Nissan and then Infinity was making 60k+ before he was 21. He's capped at around that much -- like 60-70k -- but most of our high-school friend circle wasn't making that kind of money until our late 20s (and at least one became a teacher, and still doesn't get that much in terms of pure cash comp).
Guilds are awful for immigrants and racial minorities, who are often the new entrants excluded by the guilds. Many “Jewish law firms” exist to this day because Jews were excluded from existing WASP law firms.
I’m trying to think of why it would be worse. Is it because skills become less transferable, thus making it harder for an apprentice to move from one master to another?
Perhaps that is by design - companies are wary of investing time and money training junior employees because they can just leave before the investment pays for itself?
Not sure what the answer is here; just playing devil’s advocate.
It’s because it gives guilds the power to control the pipeline of skilled labor and exclude new entrants to limit supply. Guilds are generally run by their members, and the existing members are much more likely to be white and native born than potential new entrants. Their management structure also makes it more likely that prejudices will be acted upon.
When public unions became a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, they systematically excluded Black people, for example.
A federal government can dictate what it thinks morality should be, but in practice cannot enforce morality in a free country.
Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous generations). Travel the world and you'll see that (perhaps outside some European countries) the US of today is just about the least racist country in existence.
Guilds/Unions formed today won't have the same issues as ones from 50-60 years ago because the general view of people today isn't what it was back then.
No matter what the "zeitgeist" is 20 years from now, guilds will still have the effect of artificially limiting the supply of labor to the fields they control, which has been a disaster for fields ranging from medicine to cosmetics.
Craft unions, like in construction, are more like guilds than the industrial unions. You must qualify in one way or another to be a union member before you can get hired by a union company.
But in an industrial union, as an example get hired by an automaker with a UAW contract (and not in a so called right to work state), you are a UAW member.
Guilds reflect the societies they are in. Society had more bigotry in the past, and so did the various institutions within it.
Also, it's weird that you call out guilds for being discriminatory but then give an example of discrimination in employment. We have fair employment laws to prevent this type of behavior and arguably could have "fair guild membership" laws if it became a problem.
It's fair to argue against guilds for driving up prices by limiting membership.
You’re overlooking that the non-white population is much younger (the median white person is 42, the median Hispanic person is 28) and they are driving all population growth in the country. (The absolute number of non-hispanic whites started declining in 2010). Given those changing demographics, when guilds act to limit membership (as you acknowledge they do) the bulk of those excluded are going to be non-whites.
And employment discrimination laws won’t solve the problem because the discriminatory effect arises from the legal practice of protecting existing members at the expense of potential new entrants.
I proposed guild discrimination laws similar to employment discrimination laws, making it illegal for guilds to exclude on the basis of protected categories.
That wouldn’t help. In a country where the non-white population is rapidly growing and the white population is shrinking, and also is trying to catch up in terms of education and income, the population of guild members will be whiter than the population of potential new members. Limiting supply (favoring existing members over potential new members) will in practice disadvantage non-whites.
There was a very clear example of this recently in Chicago. Lori Lightfoot explained that she wouldn’t pursue police funding cuts because under the union contracts, cuts would have to be made from newer employees first. (Last in First out.) That would mean that 2/3 of the cuts would be Black and Hispanic officers, even though less than half of the overall force is Black and Hispanic.
I mean there's a lot more to university than "success preparation". While university is indeed no guarantee for success, it does seem to help a lot with your understanding of the world and your ability to think critically.
I'm lucky enough to come from a country with free decent universities, so maybe it's easy for me to say, but I can't even put a price on how my education changed every single part of how I think and understand the world. That it prepared me for a well-paying job is just a nice side-effect.
How well do you think the misinformation that laid the foundation for the political shitstorm the US is in now could have taken hold if most people had a college education?
It's sadder than that, because the latter two implies there were some evil mustache twirling decision makers in government who want to cause grief by raising tuition. Instead, it's a combination of good intentions gone awry: the government flooding the marketplace with money by offering student loans to nearly everyone, regardless of probability of payback; and the universities happily soaking that money up by spending increasing amounts of money on "student experience" and athletic programs, in a bid to attract students.
We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above. Why would higher education be different?
The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than average income is a form of classism.
High School education was considered an actual achievement perhaps 70 years ago. Not everyone graduated. But we noticed that people who graduated high school did better, on average. So we decided to encourage people to graduate high school. Partially by force, partially by lowering standards. Now, practically everyone graduates high school, so a high school diploma is useless as a signal of quality. And so, we plan to do the same to the Bachelor's degree, except that we aren't making that free at the point of education.
I once picked up a hundred year old Latin schoolbook meant for grade schoolers (fifth grade, I think). It was significantly more information dense than the college course Latin textbook I had.
> We used too. A high school education meant something to my grandparents.
Do you have a high school education? The education I got in H.S. had a big impact on my life. I couldn't imagine being done with school at 14 and thinking that was equivalent to 4 years of High School.
>We give everyone in the U.S. high school education and we don't make the claims you make above.
Probably because a high school diploma has been so normalized that it is seen as the baseline. But that underscores the problem. Of course everyone having a high school diploma devalues it. That's part of why its seen as the default. If we make undergraduate education a similar default, it will just devalue that too. Not to mention what happens to the people who can't complete an undergraduate degree. They become even further marginalized in society.
It is faulty reasoning to notice that a bachelors degree correlates with good outcomes and then conclude that more bachelors degrees means more good outcomes. Good jobs are zero-sum. If there are more people who satisfy the requirements for good jobs, the requirements just increase. It's not like most office jobs require a bachelors degree, the fact that so many people have them makes them an effective zero-effort filter.
I don't understand this. The U.S. would be much worse without free, universal High School, regardless of whether you think it has devalued over time. I believe that if I didn't have a H.S. education, my life would be more difficult, but I get the feeling from these replies that people view a u.s. high school education as throw-away.
Many developed countries in e.g. Europe don't actually have universal academic high school like the US does - they have perhaps 1/3 of people go to academic high school, where it is more difficult than in the US (perhaps comparable to the difficulty of AP classes). The rest go to vocational or semi-vocational school.
You get there by merit not wallet, I thought usa has it the same to be honest. Sometimes I feel like Americans have very deranged view of Europe where half thinks it's some socialist equality utopia and the other half thinks a communist hellhole.
> You get there by merit not wallet, I thought usa has it the same to be honest.
The problem in the U.S. is that not all public schools are equal, so the "merit" to get into a certain school/scholarship is at least partly tied to your social-economic status.
For instance in my area, all public schools have removed arts/music/foreign language, but in the nicer neighborhoods PTA, boosters, and fundraisers have added those removed subjects back with parent donations. So you have a situation where when it comes to vote for a small tax increase to help our schools, many people are confused as their kids go to a public school with everything they need. These are schools in the same school district. New, upscale homes can also pay directly for their public school in the form of Mello-Roos taxes.
Thanks for that. Yeah, I'm all for education reform and different options so it's great to hear about different programs, but many of the comments here are dismissing education, both high school and higher ed, simply because it is less scarce or not what it used to be.
Wealth doesn't map well to what we're talking about here. No economy can support an unbounded number of "high paying" jobs, for example. While wealth has gone up steadily since the world industrialized, a good (i.e. high paying) job is relative to the current standard of living and so wont be monotonic.
At any given moment there are a fixed number of jobs, and so a fixed number of "good jobs". I can grant that the number of good jobs isn't fixed on the scale of years. But people that want/need good jobs usually can't wait years for them to materialize. On the timescales that matter to individuals, the number of good jobs is fixed and so the competition for them is effectively zero-sum.
There also seems to be a scale issue when it comes to the availability of good jobs. That is, not all jobs can be good (i.e. high paying) and there is an essential order-of-magnitude difference between the number of high paying jobs and the number of low paying jobs required to make the economics work. So the proportion of good jobs is effectively fixed even on longer timescales.
Without universal high school, the USA would still be a largely illiterate subsistence farming nation with high rates of poverty as defined at the global scale.
Even well-paying jobs in the trades require literacy and basic mathematics skills.
At one point a factory job would have been considered a good job. In modern times, they're on the low end. What counts as a "good job" is relative to the current standards of living and so you can't naively compare across timescales.
Yes, agreed. And our high schools evolved to prepare students for those good factory jobs. Now that those factory jobs aren't good, maybe our high schools should also evolve.
But the point is that we can't do away with K-12 schooling. Subsistence farming was, is, and will be a bad job.
College Algebra is required to enter a lot of trades. And not just because it's a requirement for the AS, but also because you actually do need to be able to understand the material in order to work in many trades. The students I tutor often fail college algebra, move on to their subject courses thinking they can tick off that useless stuff later, then realize they need a college algebra tutor after failing those courses because it turns out they need to understand how to interpret a table or graph of a function in order to do the job.
College Algebra is really hard for a lot of people. I can say with almost certain confidence that, even with extensive tutoring, they would never make it through that course without years of practice reasoning about mathematical objects in Algebra I and Algebra II and Geometry.
I think people who are naturally talented in STEM massively underestimate the amount of practice some people need to pick up the quantitative skills needed to enter many trades.
Which, I guess, means "everything". But really getting over that first conceptual hurdle is the hardest part. After that, it's a lot more hand-holding through exercises/practice than trying to surmount a fundamental conceptual barrier.
> What are some good examples of tables, graphs, and functions the students need to interpret?
Tables and ratios and rates of change abound in the trades. Especially anything related to electricity or water. You really need at least a conceptual understanding of variables and functions to understand a lot of the material.
Also, most tradesmen will want to run their own business at some point (that's where the money is), and tables/graphs/functions abound.
If you're struggling with college algebra, odds are good that you're uncomfortable:
1. interpolating values from a table (1/16 : x, 2/16 : y, ..., 1: z; oh no, I need to know the value for 3/32 and it's not on the table!),
2. evaluating a function at a point ("the equation tells me xs from ys and zs, but I need zs from xs and ys!").
Pick a trade and (1) and (2) are fundamentally necessary skills. Smart phone calculators obviate this some-what, but it's still important to have at least a conceptual understanding even if the mechanical skill of doing the math atrophies. Otherwise you won't even know how to use the calculator properly. See this all the time.
The money thing in particular is super important, though. I do a lot of example problems that basically boil down to "if your fixed cost is $X and the equipment needs to be replaced every 2 years, and if you charge $Y, will you make a profit? What is the smallest value of Y that will make a profit? Etc." Students really struggle with this sort of thing, especially if you throw in seasonal variable with fixed debt payments ("how much do I need to make in the summer months to cover the loan payments in the winter months?"). Questions like this are at the heart of college algebra.
Like, would not be surprising if lots of small businesses fail because the owner doesn't do the work of making sure the unit economics can cover amortized costs, and then end up defaulting on their loan.
TBH even gig economy participants need to be able to do the more basic stuff from college algebra...
> If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than average income is a form of classism.
this is true if you look at the sticker price, but does the actual cost for a low-income family grow at that rate? I'm having a hard time finding a source that shows by year what a bottom quartile family would have paid for tuition at an in-state public university or an elite institution.
I think this is bullshit. Why would institutes put such high sticker price or why wouldn't they put price clearly based on income level. No one likes when hospital do not give clear price for treatments, same applies for university.
Would it better if stores listed loaf of bread at $300 and then people can negotiate the price from there?
the grant is calculated based on your family's income, home value, savings, investments, number of children, and a couple other data points. they can't give an exact number until they see your FAFSA. it sucks that this is so complicated, but I argue most of this is necessary to fairly calculate grants. two different households making $60k might have wildly different abilities to pay for tuition.
I think you are missing my point–I believe free high school education is the U.S. is better than no free high school education, so why would free higher ed not be better as well?
What I am not saying is that education hasn't been devalued, or standards haven't changed, or anything else around the quality of education–simply that an education better than not in the u.s..
That's because high school education used to be the X, and successful people moved on to college (the new Y), but college is now the old thing and people are moving on to whatever Z is.
There are some things that does make everyone more successful. More education is overall better for society, even if it's no longer a guarantee of "success." Some things don't really get diluted but can enrich the lives of anyone they are involved in (if we disassociate the word "success" from a comparative cycle). For example, healthcare, books, digital entertainment, internet connectivity. The comparative advantage goes down, but the impact to the individual does not.
I think we are witnessing first hand why more education is not always overall better. There isn't much point in having everyone learn British Literature on a 30 year payment plan.
Perhaps we need erudition or an education that is not as formalised and compartmentalized as it seems to be. I happen there is something to be gained from literature for example. But a degree is not necessary for that purpose. The degree ends up being used for signalling or to provide some structure to 3 to 4 years between high school and full-time employment.
It's important to distinguish between education and the business of education.
I don't think I believe more education can ever be a bad thing. But the business of education in the US is an absolute nightmare that corrupts the spirit of learning it ought to protect, and I agree more of that business will not make things better for students.
More importantly, correlation does not imply causation.
Just because people born to the right family, who are free of crippling disability and disease, and possess the innate traits that enable one to be successful in the workplace also happen to go to school does not mean that going to school will change the traits you were born with, reverse the disabilities you have, and see you adopted by another family.
Funny that was missed when it is the first thing you learn when you head down the road to attaining a degree.
Giving everyone some baseline of education, I think, can be considered a good that doesn't need to be further explained. Reading/writing, basic math and science etc. Increasing the baseline to more advanced learning means a more informed general population, and therefore much more likely technical advancement and wealth creation.
It is the people that are seen as going beyond that education baseline that are the elite, and get the best careers and the most success generally (ignoring other factors for the purpose of this conversation). As you increase the baseline, what it takes to be elite also increases accordingly. I think we can all agree that it is inherently true that not everyone can be elite, in the same way that it's impossible for everyone to be above average, which is what I think you're getting at.
I think what this view may fail to consider is that the benefits of the baseline come to resemble what was previously considered elite as overall wealth increases. Middle class people now have larger homes, more vehicles, more luxury etc. than the lower-tier elites (ignoring the billionaire class here) did 100 years ago. That increase of the baseline living standard is tied to, though very much lags, the baseline of education.
Put another way, we can not eliminate the relative gap between the baseline and the elite, but, in absolute terms, as the baseline comes to meet what was previously elite in education the baseline well-being and standards of living also come to meet what was previously elite.
The value of college is not being diluted. It's the signal to employers that college degrees is useful filter that is being diluted.
Hiring in general is done poorly and I understand why. It's hard to differentiate between so many candidates especially for entry level positions where a lack of job history makes it difficult to evaluate talent. So it makes sense that employers optimize for lazy signals like completion of a degree.
In general universal education is far better for a country.
Let's turn this around. Suppose we cut back on education, to inflate its value while ensuring that the population as a whole is less educated. This should make us more prosperous. An example is our widespread prosperity thanks to the high value of medical doctors.
Colleges have become massive businesses whose purpose is to jam kids through to graduation (thus maximize tuition fees). Most kids don't really want to be there. Both parties are incentivized to "get through it". When a large number of young people have degrees obtained this way, is it any wonder the value is diminished?
It's a shame, because I loved (and continue to love) higher education.
Is it really true that, in the US, many college students don't want to be there but go nonetheless, despite having to pay absurd amounts of money?
Where I study, uni is basically free, and I've met very few people in my degree who don't want to be there.
This seems absurd to me.
My relevant experience is twenty years stale, but I'd say yes, absolutely, there are a lot of people who go to college in the US despite not actually wanting to. I saw it in many of my high-school cohort, even as they expressed their grave concern to me about my evident disinterest in doing likewise. (It was an interesting kind of place, the high school where I graduated. Early in my time there, the first person who took me aside to ask why, despite evident intelligence, I seemed not to apply myself in class, was the head of the cheerleading squad.)
If anything, I'd say the rate of people attending college despite not wanting to can only have increased since then. The assumption that college is an absolute necessity for a comfortable middle-class life has only in the last few years come into serious question, and still has yet to face anything like the inquisition it deserves.
Maybe it’s half true. I wanted to be in college, and everyone I met was happy to be there. However, there is some anger at the feeling that you HAVE to be there. There is a lot of cultural pressure to get a higher education. I also remember feeling like I had to decide the rest of my life by choosing a degree, and that really stressed me out. However, I still really wanted to go to college.
Yes, we tend to pay a lot to go to college, and yes, a lot of us feel like we must do it. A lot of choices factor into how much you pay - community college can reduce this, going to a lesser known school, etc. However, it’s an investment in yourself. For some of us, that investment works out really well. Others may struggle to get that awesome job after college.
>Is it really true that, in the US, many college students don't want to be there but go nonetheless, despite having to pay absurd amounts of money?
Judging by the number of people who don't show up to class or otherwise just "get by", it's absolutely true. People "go to college" because they're told it's their meal ticket into the middle class. This is the point of the article.
Ask the average person if they'd rather pay to have the paper degree and not have to attend any classes, or get the education for free but not receive any paper credentials. You'll have your answer.
>Judging by the number of people who don't show up to class or otherwise just "get by",
I mean, I've heard of this happening a lot in community college, but in my private university I didn't regularly see this behavior, and certainly not in the upper level classes.
>Ask the average person if they'd rather pay to have the paper degree and not have to attend any classes, or get the education for free but not receive any paper credentials. You'll have your answer.
This is an interesting thought, however I don't think it is a good test for whether someone wants to be in college/uni or not. It is reasonable to enjoy the education and be realistic about the value of the paper certificate at the same time.
The overall point about social pressures etc. is well taken though.
Senior citizens are allowed to take classes for free in North Carolina. My mother uses this to take foreign language classes. She said the older folks taking the classes take it way more seriously than the 'students' ("Who goes to class in their pajamas?")
From my experience, it is a pretty simplistic take.
A lot of people enjoy the social aspect of college (from parties to having a cohort that is interested in the same things they are).
The money issue roughly fell into three buckets: 1) students not worrying about money because they have rich parents, 2) students not worrying about money because they have student loans, and 3) students worrying a lot about money because they have student loans.
From my experience going to undergrad at a state university in the midwest, a lot of students would prefer to have a well paying job immediately after high school and not go to college. However, a lot of those same students would rather go to college than stay in their small hometown where job prospects are bleak.
Life is a long haul ride, requires a lot of things to get through it well. College education is obviously one part of it.
It would help people to realize any thing one does has an expiry date to it. This is why you need to have a system to remain consistent at some broad goals. Things like good eating, exercise, personal finance, relationships, reading and learning have to be done consistently, and have to be done throughout your life. You won't be good at life, if you don't do some of things regardless of the age, and place you are in.
The loss is in assuming College Degree as an aristocratic right. If you think this way you will soon realize there is nothing special about reading a few books between ages 18 - 22 and doing no learning after that for decades.
To me primary purpose of education is initiation. College degree should be treated as a good head start as an initiation. Nothing more, Nothing less.
Does it follow that you see basically no value in community colleges and other "low-prestige" public institutions whose participants are predominantly from outside of any aspirationally-aristocratic subculture?
Of course if you are rich you are always going to have means and mechanisms to connect with the peer rich. I'm guessing once you move out of Ivy leagues, you will always the board rooms and golf courses to continue your networking.
I'm talking more on the lines of normal people, from normal families. For people like us, education means some thing very different. Its like initial exposure to an experience we must maintain all life.
> Life is a long haul ride, requires a lot of things to get through it well. College education is obviously one part of it.
I would disagree. College education is absolutely not required to get through life. And it should be required even less than it is. There are some professions for which degrees are super useful. But most people doing degrees are going into professions that just require any degree and could easily be done without one.
I have a good friend of mine from high school who right after graduating became a welder. He has a very high quality of live, better than many of my friends who are doctors who are in debt and just now starting to pay off loans.
Life is a long haul ride, requires a lot of things to get through it well. College education is obviously one part of it. <
To me College screwed my long haul instead.
When I graduated, I couldn't find any legal jobs (I could find some jobs masquerading as contracts, that employers offered to avoid paying taxes properly), because whenever I did, the person that got hired was someone else that DIDN'T go to college, but had 4 years of experience more than me.
After some time working (like I said, as "contractor"), and I finally had some experience, my issue was that people hired were either younger with same experience, or my age but more experienced.
And then of course there was the issue that my job selection was extremely limited, I could only take jobs that would let me pay my massive student debt, it felt to me my life wasn't much different than the one of a literal slave, being forced to work into very specific jobs because I couldn't take a job that paid less, or take my time to find a better job, etc...
Now I am 33, I have a wife, don't live with my parents anymore, have a reasonable income.
Still can't get unemployment benefits, because never been employed.
Still I am not even called to many job interviews, because "no experience".
Or one time, I was called to a job interview in a big asian multinational that had a Brazillian gamedev office, they been complaining on media for months they were not finding people qualified for the job, the job title was exactly what I had a degree for, the HR loved me and all.
Then when the last step left was for them to get authorization from higher ups... the authorization didn't came.
Know why?
Well, because although I had a degree, they didn't cared about the degree, what they cared about, was experience.
So no, college is NOT "obviously" part of anything unless you mean being "obviously" part of crushing student debt that force thousands into conditions that in my country are literally legally slavery if the owner of the debt was also the employer (we have a law named "employment analogous to slavery", one of its points is that employing people to have them repay their debt to you is considered slavery).
The four years I spent at my university were four of the best years of my life. I grew academically, socially, and career-wise in ways I just never would have without going to school. However, I have plenty of friends that never went to any higher education than high school, or who dropped out of college early on, and it's not like they're unsuccessful or maladjusted. It seems pretty clear that different paths work for different people.
Yeah, as much as I hate the university as an institution, they're still necessary for a large amount of people (in practice) These threads tend to be filled with comments that assume everyone is a developer and / or should be. Unfortunately many, if not most high paying jobs will still require higher education, particularly the stereotypically well paying ones. You aren't going to become a doctor, engineer (non software), lawyer, etc. without that degree unfortunately.
What you say is true, but there are plenty of smart people who start in the trades and then leverage their way up to making millions in business for themselves. When I said I had plenty of friends who were successful without a college degree, I was specifically thinking of auto mechanics. While I'm the typical "developer" type you reference, my main hobby is classic sports cars (which started during my time at college, coincidentally). From that hobby I know quite a few "high school only" folks who are now independently wealthy and fully satisfied with their lives, from building up automotive businesses.
> Unfortunately many, if not most high paying jobs will still require higher education, particularly the stereotypically well paying ones.
Not just any higher education, though, but specific professional degrees that grant access to supply managed markets. That part seems to be often missed when this topic comes up.
I recall a Gallup study into the top 1% finding that something like 70% of the top 1% have a professional degrees (doctors, lawyers, etc.). The remaining portion was comprised of more people with high school or less than those with only a bachelor degree, suggesting that a bachelor degree alone does nothing to improve your prospects. Which goes against the common thinking.
But is also echoed in the general economy. With the rise of post-secondary attainment, incomes have held stagnant. If there was a financial advantage gained though higher education itself, not through supply management, incomes would be rising.
The article spends a little time, in the middle on the headline assertion
"College does not guarantee Happiness"
But spends more time on an anecdote about the author's son to demonstrate that "Happiness is possible without College", which is a different matter entirely. And one would hope the latter is true, since 2/3 of the US population does not attend college.
This article is very light on content and I'm kinda surprised something this banal and content-less even made it to an actual publication.
Also, the guy's son graduated high school two years ago, he's 20-21 years old, practically everyone is happy at that age, let's hear about his life satisfaction at 40. That's ignoring the fact that two years is hardly enough time to evaluate the long term outcome of a major life decision.
To be clear, I don't think the author's son will grow up to be miserable, like the parent pointed out, most people don't have a college degree and most people aren't miserable. But this should be obvious.
"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question."
I think as time goes on, I am learning that humans are dissatisfied because they no longer know how to live the life of a human, where (wild) pigs are fully capable of living the life of a pig. The big eye-opener for me was "The Story of B", by Daniel Quinn. Say what you want about the completeness or quality of its anthropology, it has touched on an ineffable fact that we are constantly trying to use more of what is bad for us to try to make it good.
"But he did have plans: He found a job across the country on a wheat farm in central Idaho. This wasn’t a hobby or a whim. He became part of a community of honest, hardworking people. He worked from dawn until well past dark through his first harvest, driving a combine, fixing fences, and picking rocks out of the soil. In the winter he found a job apprenticing to an expert cabinetmaker, and started his own small business hauling firewood.
"After his second harvest, with money in the bank, our son joined the Marine Corps, a dream he had had for several years. He finished boot camp and is now at infantry school in North Carolina. He wakes up at 4 a.m., is tired all the time—and is happy. He is, as a translation of the second-century Saint Irenaeus puts it, “a man fully alive.”"
Happiness is possible without college, but geeze, I think I'll pass on that road.
(On the other hand, I know people who have taken roughly that road; he discovered he didn't like ranching (and it didn't pay squat) and joined the Navy, spent 8 years and two deployments in. Seems to have worked out pretty well. On the other hand, he recently completed a bachelors at a for-profit school (that mostly exists to absorb GI-bill benefits, AFAICT) and wants to go back for a masters for some reason.)
That's interesting because that lifestyle doesn't sound all that bad to me. It's not for everyone, but a lot of people really enjoy working outside with their hands and find sitting in an office going to meetings to be incredibly stifling.
I had this debate with myself when I was younger because I really like physical work but am probably better at knowledge work. The biggest reasons I work an office job is that they tend to pay much better than other work and it's easy to end up in a physical job that can take a bad toll on your body over time.
If you are facing minimum of £27k tuition debt in England which AFAIK gathers interest from day one I would probably skip it. And it's even worse in the US.
As far as webdev goes, you could do a bootcamp and be earning money within 6 months to a year. That's money that's hopefully going into your pension fund and earning interest while your peers are still in class.
Or you could learn to code using cheap and/or free resources. College isn't the only place to learn things nowadays and I think a lot of people haven't caught up with that yet.
I used to think nothing could beat the college experience for bonding but I think the formula of lots of people doing the same thing every day in a niche environment they want to be in is easily repeatable. I'm still in contact with digital nomads I hung out with in Bansko two years ago and I was only there for a month. But it was an intense month of seeing each other every day, just like college.
Oh and don't worry about not finding a dev job if you don't go to college. Employers are coming around slowly and there are lots of success stories out there: www.nocsdegree.com
If bootcamps were a valid pathway into the profession at the time after I left high school I definitely would have foregone my Computer Science degree and gone down that route.
I'm glad attitudes towards them have shifted in the last few years - most of my friends in the profession work in companies that actively seek out applicants from bootcamps.
I think employers are coming around to hire more non-CS majors, which is a good thing. However, most people I know of who got into software engineering didn't just skip college, do a bootcamp, and get a job as an engineer. Either they started businesses (which comes with its own financial risk), worked in some other technical area (IT, wordpress administration, etc.), or did a bootcamp in order to switch careers (and thus had acquired a lot of important soft skills).
I would love more different avenues for people to come to software engineering, and I'm rooting for boot camps, but I'm also skeptical about how universal the benefits are. I think coding is much more of a learnable skill than many already in industry give it credit, but I also think it takes years, not weeks, to learn to do it well.
My concern would be whether people who take the bootcamp or self taught approach would have the grounding in engineering and CS theory that someone with a degree has.
I tend to feel that under-emphasizing these things are why the software industry has so much of a problem with poor designs, low code quality, and missed deadlines.
Maybe it would be possible to create a two year degree that would fill in those gaps.
Here are my opinions being in the industry through various roles as a dev, technical lead, and dev manager.
I think there is too much weight put on CS theory but it is valuable if you already have it through a degree.
Outside of FAANG and similar unicorn growth kind of companies nearly nobody else needs a new X or a different design of Y. I'd even go as far to say most of the time we don't even need to understand the internal of the tool itself.
Gut feel says upwards of 99% of companies just need existing solutions combined. I'd say 20% of the industry itself thinks they're actually apart of the 1% that are truly facing a problem nobody else has.
I've seen companies suffer from too much CS theory. They get caught up in the technical problems and the most ideal solutions instead of focusing on providing customer value.
We hear this through the many talks about premature optimization and reinventing the wheel but in the real world I hear a lot of individuals calling the work a hack when it isn't the most optimized solution.
Yeah, 99% of companies that need software developers can (and should) get away with boring CRUD solutions using boring persistence like an RDBMS. You could probably go a little fancier on your choice of language, using a nice functional language like F# versus something like Java.
99% of those companies building boring CRUD solutions don't even need developers. They could just piece something together off the shelf and be done with it. There's tons of products out there.
I barely skimmed the article, but I don't find this surprising for a few reasons (some of which have been mentioned elsewhere in the comments):
- "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees.
- Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of university degrees.
- All universities are not created equal. While it is possible (and even common) for employers to pay too much attention to the reputation of the school, it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England).
- The exorbitant debt incurred by university tuition in some countries (which need not be named, I think) means the ROI on the university degree has to also be exorbitant.
Was this the purpose? I thought it was to raise living standards by improving productivity. By and large, broader education has been successful at that. (It went off the deep end, in recent years, with the proliferation of bullshit degrees.)
I think you covered part of the problem in the second half of your statement.
In the US, part of the problem is that by making education debts non-dischargable in bankruptcy, and by the aforementioned proliferation of degrees that may qualify as 'nice to have' rather than 'increase earning potential'.
The end result is a lot of people who got a college degree that doesn't really pay for itself, and instead leads to 20+ years of debt, or 10 years of indentured servitude to a non-profit.
Making education debts dischargeable in bankruptcy sounds good in theory, but against what collateral do you take out a college loan? Most bankruptcy includes collateral liquidation. What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degree that doesn't contribute to the nation's economy, and then discharges the debt in bankruptcy?
I think a big part of the problem is that debt is so readily issued for degrees that overwhelmingly leave the recipient incapable of providing for society in gainful ways.
> What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degree that doesn't contribute to the nation's economy, and then discharges the debt in bankruptcy?
I assume lenders would take the degree being pursued, institution at which it’s being pursued and applicant’s academic history (and this likelihood of completing it) into account.
Currently, there is zero incentive to do that work.
I never knew the date, 1998 sounds super-recent. But digging a bit, it sounds like that's the last step of many, with the first bankruptcy restrictions in 1976 (when the only concern imagined was medical & law degrees!)
> What's to stop someone from obtaining a useless degree that doesn't contribute to the nation's economy, and then discharges the debt in bankruptcy?
Nothing, and that's exactly why education debts need to be dischargeable like anything else.
Dischargeable loans makes loan companies have actual responsibility and consequences in deciding who to give loans to. Otherwise, they blindly give out loans (why not, there's no risk!), putting all that much money in the system, which college institutions are happy to absorb in higher tuition.
But it could lead to plenty of people making the smart decision to file for bankruptcy even when they have a good degree. Bankruptcy at 22 isn’t that big of a deal, generally.
I’m not sure what the answer is, though I think an economic approach is key.
If the lender can garnish future wages, I think the incentives are still pointing in the right direction. The only way the lender loses money is by lending too much to someone who will never be able to pay it back - which is what you want, presumably.
What if you need do anything significant with your money in those 7 years? Like rent an apartment? Have a car to get to work?
The debt doesn't just magically go away. Chapter 7 requires liquidating assets, and chapter 13 requires paying some loans back anyway. And besides, I don't see why loan companies couldn't require cosigners to reduce risk on these college loans.
>Like rent an apartment? Have a car to get to work?
Then you rent an apartment or buy a car. Are you implying you can't do this after bankruptcy? It's much easier to do these with a bankruptcy on your "record" than with a $1000 monthly payment.
If you've got an 800 score and no money, no one will give you a loan. If you've got a trash credit score, but an extra $1000 that isn't going to loans, then you can 'afford' to get fleeced on 36% 72 month auto loans for 7 years until your credit is rebuilt.
Depending on the market, I can’t imagine it being easy/straightforward for someone with “trash credit” to find a landlord willing to lease an apartment at the market-rate.
That $1000 is likely getting spent no matter what, either in repaying loans, or paying a premium over the market rate to get a landlord to agree to lease you an apartment instead of someone with an 800 score.
This is spot on. Currently there is very little accountability for predatory student lending. For my mortgage I had to talk to multiple people on the phone, show proof of income, and have a background check. For my student loan I just had to give my parents' socials and prove I was attending college. I know nothing about the laws around this, but I suspect it was set up this way with good intentions. Unfortunately changing this will probably require a nation-wide acceptance that not all degrees are created equal.
It would be interesting to see insurance companies have more skin in the game - we would probably start getting much more accurate breakdowns of ROI by major, degree, and school.
It seems like we should make the debt conditional on the degree pursued. How much you’re allowed to take out in federal loans ought to be a function of the pay associated with that degree. I’m sure it’s not a perfect system, but it seems a lot better than the status quo or solutions that involve burdening society with the economic liability of a glut of (economically) low-value degrees.
My suggestion to achieve this is to cap repayments (of non-dischargable loans), perhaps at 15% of taxable income, and written off 20 years after signing. That would make lenders very interested in the outcomes of various courses. And their offers to prospective students would convey useful career advice, too.
$393 is 15% of $2620 which annualizes to $31,512, which is about the median personal income for full-time workers (whoops, before taxes). ($222 is 15% of $17,760 annual, about the poverty line for two.) That's not a wildly big change over the current state.
20% pretax deduction would probably be sufficient for repayment. Of course loan reform in general would probably be a good idea. If there are 10k graduating with a degree in a field with only 100 jobs/year needing that degree, or likewise paying less than $40k/year, should probably not be granting loans for those degrees in the first place.
10,15,20% all plausible figures, the point is just to ensure that it can't get so large that it gets in the way of living your life.
> 10k graduating with a degree in a field with only 100 jobs/year needing that degree
What I'd live very much to avoid is having a centralized body which makes such decisions. Under my scheme, lenders who identify such fields will be reluctant to grant loans, but how they decide what's in the field, and what exceptions to make, the can do however they like.
A few years ago, I read that at least two big-name U.S. universities announced plans to pilot something like this, where tuition was free, and they'd get a fixed percentage of employment income (wages plus bonus, etc.) for a fixed number of years after graduation.
The university takes on the risk, but they have much more information about their students and their degree programs than students, governments, or private lenders, so they're probably best placed to be making informed risk decisions. Under the current systems, the government and the student take on the risk, while the university and the private lenders get the rewards.
Would you mind elaborating on your experiences in France and England? I'm curious about the situation there. I was under the impression that there are many effective non-college options in those countries (England's pretty robust apprenticeship system comes to mind), and that university is generally both hard to get into and relatively cheap to complete. I also haven't lived in either France or England, so I speak from a place of little knowledge.
I'm not sure for how much this accounts, but the UK allowed polytechnics to call themselves universities. Of course, this then increases the number of people going to uni... but this might've been a bad idea. While there was a prestige issue with the name, they now have to compete on a similar playing field.
Germany's interesting here, since they had/have Fachhochschulen (apparently translated to University of Applied Sciences). Some of which were very highly regarded, and offered a different focus that suited some people. Although after the Bologna Process, this difference is less clear, too.
It's not hard to get into a university in the UK. It is quite hard to get into a 'top' university, and Oxbridge typically requires a fair bit of luck in addition to being very hard.
There are pretty decent apprenticeships, but only so many people want to work trades regardless. It's not exactly a ticket to wealth or status like a degree might still be perceived.
From an American perspective, it seems extremely easy to get into a 'top' UK university. Oxford and Cambridge admit around 20% of applicants. Compared to Princeton (6%), Stanford (4%), MIT (7%), etc. it seems like a cakewalk. Is there something I'm missing?
My friends in the US all apply to a very large number of elite universities. In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall. One person I know in the US applied to 23 universities.
And then on top of that, in the UK all admissions for elite universities and most below that require an in-person interview, which the US (bafflingly) doesn't do.
I think I applied to one elite and two just below elite.
All of this means total applications in the UK are far fewer than in the US but each is more focused and more realistic which makes successful admissions seem higher. But really people who wouldn't have gotten in didn't apply in the first place.
> it seems extremely easy to get into a 'top' UK university
Also, what's with these scare-quotes? Are you skeptical that they're really top universities? They consistently top international rankings, alongside your best.
I see; I didn't know that. I was using the quotes from the parent comment; I don't know enough about the UK system to know which are considered 'top' -- which I'm guessing is as subjective and rancorous a discussion as it is here -- to be confident in my own judgment beyond the parent-cited Oxbridge.
> In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall.
When I applied to university a while ago the rule was that you can apply to 5 universities only, ie make 5 applications in total. Only exception was "clearing" but thats a different story
Yes, Oxbridge are not the only excellent universities in the UK. The Russell Group is a piss take, Queens University Belfast and whatever the Welsh representative is are not world class but the LSE and Imperial are, among others.
"- All universities are not created equal. While it is possible (and even common) for employers to pay too much attention to the reputation of the school, it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England)."
From what I've seen over the last decade, this is incredibly true in the United States, particularly with the rise of for-profit schools offering online degrees.
> it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England).
Tuition in France is basically free from what I understood. Even if students over-evaluate the value of the school, the fact that it's free still makes it attractive. And I think that some universities are teaching only (no research) no?
It's only free if you forget opportunity cost. Lots of people working behind cash registers with 4 year degrees would have been much happier going to trade schools and being well on their way to being small business owners/co-owners.
There's no doubt that not having crippling debt is much better than having crippling debt. However, we have this cultural idea that being on the road to taking partial owneship of a small skilled labor business is inferior to being in a dead-end job with a 4-year degree. I fear that an over-emphasis on opening access to 4-year degrees implicitly reinforces this idea of 4-year degrees being universally better and that tradespeople have somehow settled for second-best, even if they have more income, a better work-life balance, and are providing absolutely essential services.
> - Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of university degrees.
I know enacting social change is much much harder than throwing money at problems, but I wish America figured out a way to really strengthen the cultural admiration for the hard-working craftsperson archetype.
Pete Buttigieg took a lot of flak for pointing out that many jobs in America don't require a college degree, and there should be nothing shameful about learning a skilled trade instead of going to college. We have a vast over-supply of many college majors, and (I'm told) big shortages in many skilled trades. There are way too many people with 4-year degrees from top-100 schools working cash registers in retail, when they'd have far less debt and higher income (and a good chance of later becoming successful small business owners) if they'd gone to trade school instead of college.
It's honestly classist to push 4-year degrees so hard. There's something noble about optimizing your own happiness while providing valuable services, despite much of America considering skilled laborers to be a class below cashier workers with useless 4-year degrees. I wish we as a society could better appreciate skilled laborers.
We don't have much positive to show from decades of flooding the college tuition markets with cheap credit / crippling debt and implicitly pushing hard the notion that going to trade school is settling for second-best.
There's something to be said about removing the crippling personal debt from the act of flooding the education markets with money, but without cultural changes, I think a big effect would be further ballooning of college costs. I fear the crippling debt will just get hidden as accelerating the ballooning of government debt without moving the needle much on inequality.
> "- Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of university degrees."
no, what it's done is uncover the hypocrisy of the meritocracy underlying western narrative--when university degrees were exclusive to the upper class white guys, degrees exhibited a "meritocratic distinction". naturally, only smart and capable people got degrees, not just people in a fiercely-defended and exclusive club.
but when educational attainment became more wide-spread and democratic, the club moved on and abandoned the university degree as a useful in-group signal. economic value was with in-group membership, not in the degree itself, a decidedly unmeritocratic, and unequal, system.
it's made this relationship more apparent, elucidating why inequality has persisted despite wider degree attainment.
College was a lot less expensive when I went many years ago. However, I suppose that if I had sunk what I and my family spent on it into local real estate, I could have made more money over the years. I have regrets about college--I wish I had taken more math, I wish I had studied more foreign languages--but none of the regrets are financial.
It seems like people think you should be able to just check a few boxes, then slot into a 9-5 and have everything taken care of for you for the rest of your life.
Well, it doesn't work like that. Even after college you're still going to have to plan and think and take action to make things happen for you. It's not just all going to fall into your lap because you took a few classes in your early 20s.
To be fair, it used to work like that in America. Graduate high school, get a decent paying union job in your hometown with an okay house to raise a family. Drink beer and watch sports on the weekends with neighborhood buddies. Work 30-40 years and retire.
Which was launched and substantially overlapped with a period where the US was the largest export manufacturing base left standing and where massive rebuilding was needed on more than one continent.
I hope to not experience a repeat of those initial conditions.
With the huge increases in productivity since the 1950's, people should be working less hours than in 1950. I don't have a good reason why this should be an anomaly in history.
Exactly. We come back to our original problem. Our society turned "luxuries" like college, into basic necessities that one must do or have. Two cars, big homes, two parents able to work, phones, etc. are all great, but they cease to be luxuries when they become required.
Sure, but I would argue you are in the minority, and it is a large subset of people who can work hard and be dependable, but don't have the talent to be a highly skilled knowledge worker, or can't pivot to different skill sets, which is required to have dependable employment these days.
It may have worked like that for a portion of the population for a short period of time, but getting a union job was not a guarantee, and what your describing was not possible or very difficult for the majority of the population like women, non-white people, and recent immigrants.
>It seems like people think you should be able to just check a few boxes, then slot into a 9-5 and have everything taken care of for you for the rest of your life.
If you're not particularly ambitious, yes. The whole system runs on ordinary people's labor, and it's an authoritarian system: when you go to work, you're following orders. It shouldn't be on you to take constant initiative and exercise your intelligence in finding new orders to follow, new ways to subordinate yourself to someone else's goals.
If you want to treat people as subordinates, you have to take care of them, and yes, that means taking off the anxiety and cognitive load of potential unemployment.
If you want people to do all this thinking for themselves, why shouldn't they recognize they're being exploited and get rid of you and your system?
First, the system doesn't belong to any one person. Not even the owner of a company. They own one company. They don't own capitalism itself.
And yes, you are always free to get rid of any one company's system and start your own system (i.e. company). What people find when they do this is that with freedom comes a lot of responsibility.
The article seemed underwhelming to me. TLDR: college doesn't guarantee future happiness (uhm, what does guarantee it?) some kids would be happier just going to work.
That's fair, but while some kids would thrive going to work after college many more would be hampered by a lack of a college education for the rest of their lives.
Probably US specific but, in most schools, education sucks and all good colleges (not just super expensive; state schools, too) offer a solid STEM background to fix the damage after lousy schools. College should not be necessary, but in the US it kind of is.
So to make college optional, fix schools: reduce hours and drudgery, focus on consistent STEM background, give extra support to kids that excel in a subjext. My 2c.
Assuming you went to college for a marketable and "valuable" degree - by this, I mean a degree with a clear path to a somewhat stable career. Usually, if you don't have internships you've already shot yourself in the foot.
Plenty of people with family money and college still find ways to go bankrupt from addiction, real-estate woes or bad investments.
Some just don't care enough or have enough drive to be "successful".
Some who find success get involved with the wrong people, or think their source of money is an endless fountain and go broke or worse end up on the street.
Goodness do journalists write for simpletons these days...
I think it is conventional knowledge that if you are a minority you are often forced to overcome discrimination and are being judged more harshly. I mostly second-hand experienced this because half of my family are immigrants from a country that had "low-status" when they got here.
Just to be sure: if you are young/new please don't take this as discouragement. The less it applies to you the better. And if you face discrimination then take pride in your accomplishments in spite of adversity.
Based on my experience its the opposite. If you are a female minority, large companies will pay you to attend a bootcamp and join them. There are so many great opportunities out there for people from all sorts of backgrounds
No one really goes to college and grad school to learn. Higher ed is commoditized as a:
* insurance policy, where students use it to avoid limiting themselves to low-status and low-paying careers
* lottery ticket, the gateway to a "prestige" career track [1]
* status signaling mechanism, where young people flex their educational elitism [2]
And higher ed is arguably bad at what its supposed be good at - a delivery mechanism of relevant knowledge. If you have ever interviewed a fresh grad who didn't study "Cracking the Coding Interview" or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt, then you know what I am talking about.[3] The internet is the most effective information distribution delivery and it's much cheaper, no wonder the value of college is in question.
[1] Consulting, finance, corporate middle management, grad school
[2] How many times have you been on a date and you tell or ask the other person where they wen to college, what they majored in, etc
[3] Arguably, the standard that hiring managers set for new grads is too high. Perhaps it's the employer that should be training fresh grads, but that is not how the current job market works. I think about this a lot because it causes problems for both young people and employers.
> If you have ever interviewed a fresh grad who didn't study "Cracking the Coding Interview"
Goodhart's Law.
> or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt
IME: end-of-course projects at places like MIT and Carneige Mellon are often much more impressive than the CRUD web app or copy-pasta Jupyter notebooks I tend to see from e.g. coding bootcamps or especially self-taught applicants. And students usually have a half dozen or more of those, in addition to internship projects.
Sometimes a self-taught person comes along with a genuinely impressive project, and I push hard to hire those folks. But for the most part it's silly little single-person-project web apps and such.
> The internet is the most effective information distribution delivery and it's much cheaper, no wonder the value of college is in question.
The questioning only really has a loud voice in places like the USA with horrendously expensive higher ed systems. I don't really hear a lot of griping about the cost of education or opining on internet alternatives when I'm in Munich or Vienna.
> end-of-course projects at places like MIT and Carneige Mellon
Very few students study at places like MIT and Carnegie Mellon. They typical CS program, even the typical "good but not exemplary" CS program, does not direct students to produce "projects" on nearly the same level. I even went to a college that has a well-regarded senior capstone project for its traditional engineering majors, but the CS equivalent felt far more low-effort and unconsequential. Among my classmates, the ones who had significant side projects and internship/co-op results were the ones with preferential outcomes and the ones who only had end-of-course projects to show were the ones with "typical" outcomes.
The non-flagship state uni a lot of my friends went to had fantastic project-based coursework in CS. Acceptance rate is like 70% and tuition is very affordable.
Agreed that ENG departments tend to do better at this, especially at mid-tier state schools. CS departments need to take project-based work and especially capstones much more seriously.
At the University of Washington (which consistently ranks at the level of MIT and Stanford for Computer Science), someone with a bachelor's in Computer Science would generally be expected to complete at least two of:
* Operating Systems: Either implement lock/fork, assorted system calls, and virtual memory for OS/161; or implement a device driver.
* Networks: Implement the Tor protocol or a project of similar complexity.
* Compilers: Implement a compiler for simplified Java including at least constant propagation or a similar optimization.
* Animation: A year-long course series that culminates with animating a few-minute long movie.
* A small video game.
* A Maps-style program for finding the shortest walk between any two locations on campus, including displaying that information. This one was required for Computer Science.
All but the last of these were done in groups of 2-3 people. It might have been theoretically possible to graduate with only one big project, if you took machine learning, security (the final project for this one was finding an exploit in Firefox, but no actual code was required), and some heavy theory classes. Most people would have done at least 3-4 big projects like this.
>The questioning only really has a loud voice in places like the USA with horrendously expensive higher ed systems. I don't really hear a lot of griping about the cost of education or opining on internet alternatives when I'm in Munich or Vienna.
There's also a growing anti intellectual movement in the US, you even see it here on hacker news. If you start with the premise that education is at best useless and at worse actively harmful of course the cost would be questioned.
> Sometimes a self-taught person comes along with a genuinely impressive project, and I push hard to hire those folks. But for the most part it's silly little single-person-project web apps and such.
In your view, what distinguishes the former from the latter? CS is not my primarily skillset, but I do know "how to program". And, because I'm a grad student, I want to do something with a very high impressive:time ratio, if that makes sense.
> In your view, what distinguishes the former from the latter?
Hard to give a generic answer.
Basically, anything that makes me say "yeah there's no youtube tutorial for that, no public github repo you could copy ideas from, and you had to have solved a lot of difficult gritty problems in creative ways to get it to work".
For that reason, A lot of the most impressive projects I've seen demonstrates the potential of a new tech stack. Demonstrations of promise can be either really cool demos or else pieces of infrastructure that lower the barrier to entry/iteration time/etc.
Back when 3D printing and laser sintering where new technologies, here are examples of cool projects around that emerging stack:
* digging into the firmware and/or hacking around the firmware to fix some limitation of the machine. This is probably not relevant anymore, but was when 3D printers were still new and had annoying bugs.
* A domain-specific CAD-like tool that did a bunch of "physically possible" checks for certain types of objects by using numerical analysis to do a bunch of ad hoc checks. Fantastic project because you can look at it and say "if you took two years and did this in a more systematic way it'd be a great product"
* auto-generated statues/art
* etc.
NB: that would be a bit less impressive these days, because 3D printing is now mainstream and a lot of these projects can be done via copy-pasta development from github repos, or even by following a youtube tutorial.
What is your primary skillset, and what's an emerging capability in that space? How can you use software to either demonstrate the promise of that capability or else build useful infrastructure that could make that capability easier to access?
NB: this is mostly for undergrad and maybe non-thesis masters projects. If you're in a thesis masters program or phd program, focus on doing science. Pick a good advisor and listen.
Thanks for the ideas. I'm well into a physics phd program, specializing in biophysics. I want to work in biotech/pharma afterward, so I want to "prove my skill" with R/Python/C++. Trying to find a doable project that overlaps, that doesn't just seem like one of the genomics/bioinformatics practice problems.
Cracking the Coding Interview isn't really needed if the candidate's had a real algorithm and data structure class.
What is great with MIT/CMU style projects is that they demonstrate a good knowledge of the fundamentals of engineering and often required a significant amount of learning on a very scoped subject to complete the project. That is something I want to hire for, because I know that even if these guys know nothing about my specific tech stack and problem space, they will be able to figure it out quick.
I repeated it a couple of times, bootcamp projects are often worthless, and more often than not the goal of the bootcamp is to manage to complete the project, which is identical to the one that the other 40 students completed. They are often made to be flashy and show (non-technical) hiring managers that they have the right applied skills to churn out code immediately, but I'm pretty sure a lot of bootcamp grads could not figure out how to translate their toy app to a different framework or ecosystem in any reasonable amount of time.
status signaling has a bigger impact to employers as a basic signal of competency
I think the deluge of undergrad degrees is the cause of this? a degree isn't a meaningful differentiate? rather just a expected baseline all prospective employees must have
> Perhaps it's the employer that should be training fresh grads, but that is not how the current job market works.
Funnily enough that is effectively what happens in many cases anyway. You still need to shell out the 40k for the undergrad degree to even get the opportunity to learn on the job.
Apparently, I'm among the select few who learned things during my college years and actually apply it professionally. Go me.
The fact that most software developer jobs of the present day don't really make use of a college education says more about the profession of software development than the value of getting a degree. Software development is becoming a commoditized, blue collar job that anybody off the street can do and that will have long term impact on the market value of ordinary developers.
And higher ed is arguably bad at what its supposed be good at - a delivery mechanism of relevant knowledge. If you have ever interviewed a fresh grad who didn't study "Cracking the Coding Interview" or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt, then you know what I am talking about.[3] The internet is the most effective information distribution delivery and it's much cheaper, no wonder the value of college is in question.
I don't think it's true. Colleges and education in general are teaching people. But it's more like drinking from a firehose.
But nobody cares about effort to retain what you drank from said firehose, so 90% to maybe 99% of it basically disappears into ether, unless you're in a profession that actually makes use of what you're taught.
> I did. As did many of my classmates. I've found engineering fascinating since I was a child so I enjoyed the opportunity.
I was told from a young age college was about learning and not grades. I believed that lie, aggressively optimized for learning over grades and that was a huge mistake.
Several times I skipped doing boring unnecessary homework or going to a useless class to
work on projects that would teach me more. I would routinely do things like skip class to go above and beyond on interesting projects.
Despite getting above a 90 on all of my projects and exams, I graduated with a 2.4. I would routinely have calls with potential employers where they would say "wow after talking to you we're really impressed with your knowledge of c.s. and the projects you've completed. Oh btw I didn't see your gpa on your resume, what was it? Oh, I'm sorry. We only take people who have a gpa about 2.5/3.0/3.5. but don't worry you seem super personable and smart I know you're going to find something".
Now I tell all of my younger siblings. Optimize for grades and that's the only thing that matters. You can always pick up a book but you'll never be able to fix your gpa. My 2.4 and my wife's 4.0 continue to influence our lives (albeit now much more mildly) 10 years later.
It is if you major in STEM (and you apply yourself and get internships, etc) - Majoring in "Eastern Gender Studies" will likely waste 4 years of your life.
As someone with a STEM degree who enjoyed taking online classes at a CC during their 20s in Art History, I wouldn't call it a waste of time; it's brought me more joy, balance, and a feeling of well-roundedness than I had contributing to os projects.
In all seriousness, I agree with you. However, I think some degrees are borderline "hobby-tier" - They're cool, but not very useful outside of personal enjoyment.
True, I believe it does lead to a well rounded individual to study the arts and humanities, but with the cost of a college degree, the ROI on those courses ($900 per course) is not worth the investment.
applied STEM will pay off for the investment. I still take college courses online after my Masters in CS. I really enjoy learning about humanities and arts at a cheaper CC during my free time.
I've always wondered - is there a way that we can decouple liberal education from technical skill building in the US university system? Because I absolutely agree that people crave and need the joy and balance that you describe, but currently its being held hostage to the price of at least 10k a year! Its so sad, I would kill for affordable, offline liberal education. The instructor doesn't even need to be elite (in fact I would prefer that she/he were not!), they just need to have a cool format.
Even only a subset of STEM is "useful" from what I've seen. Particularly in the science part there's just so few jobs and such high education requirements.
I see that STEM chauvinism is still alive and well on Hacker News.
Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.
You were a bit vague, but STEM has the highest concentration of job options that can pay you $60-70k straight out of college.
Well other than finance, but you could argue that STEM is heavily mixed into that field of study (and its derivatives) as well (mathematics, technology, data science)
Sometimes I wonder why we have to choose. Why can't we take STEM degree and learn humanities from Coursera/Khan Academy. Or we take humanities degree and learn programming from Coursera/EdX/Youtube.
You don't have to choose; there is plenty of time during a four-year college education to do both. Plenty of people double major across STEM and humanities. Or if you don't want that level of commitment, you can create breadth with your electives.
Even in pure STEM jobs, like physics academia (where I work), writing/skill is probably the most important skill you need to develop to be a working, publishing scientist.
The way I look at it now after working for large and small tech companies, the Stem degree will help you land your first job because you can be extremely green as long as you have that stem BS.
However a self taught programmer with a humanities degree can also get to the same position with some sweat equity.
Once at the position of software developer the person with the humanities degree takes off.
They've learned to write, they learned to talk and be communicative amongst friends and colleagues. Your job will let you learn as you go wrt to tech, but not as much with soft skills. where the stem grad is still that weird awkward guy who gets into arguments about pedantics, the humanities person is writing proposals and building a network.
The stem person needs to put in a lot more work on the soft skills they never learned, especially if they want to rise in the rankings, this is where the humanities person has that leg up
does getting a humanities degree improve one's soft skills, or do people that already have good soft skills choose and succeed in humanities degrees?
I took several upper-level humanities courses in college (almost enough to get a classics minor), but I don't really feel like they improved my ability to communicate/network in the office. in my experience, these courses teach the material and the skill of writing a very specific kind of formal research paper that doesn't have much to do with business or technical writing. while you don't directly use a lot of the concepts you learn in a CS degree, I find the technical background much more useful in my day-to-day work.
> Majoring in "Eastern Gender Studies" will likely waste 4 years of your life.
I took a bunch of art history courses that focused mostly on Asia while double majoring in STEM fields.
I'm a scientist, not a designer, but I do manage a team that includes designers. I often have to weigh in on certain design choices, and getting those choices right is often make/break for the project. The tools and skills I developed in art history courses are super helpful. As a manager or either people or product, these "soft" fields that intersect with anthro start providing a lot of value.
A good friend double-majored in music and has a similar opinion.
So, I would not recommend majoring exclusivity in an obscure humanity. But attending university without taking some upper-division humanities courses is probable a mistake.
Oh, and ignoring intro-level humanities courses is an even bigger mistake. SWEs who are weak coders can often be mentored. SWEs who can't write or communicate well are pretty much a lost cause.
that's the argument for going to a liberal arts college and majoring a BA in CS instead of a BS.
It be an interesting study to look at universities that offer both tracks.
Take Columbia University that where one can earn a BSE in CS from the school of engineering, or one can earn a BA from columbia college. where the students are taking many of the same "core" CS classes, but the engineering students have a larger CS course load, while the BA students have a larger humanities course load.
I'm sure there are other universities that have similar setups where one can get similar degrees with different course load emphasis.
Comparing outcomes at places like Columbia would be fascinating.
Not sure I agree about liberal arts colleges writ large. The tippy-top tier are pretty great. But the ones in our region have... eclectic... CS faculty. Random math phds and early retirement from industry types. Entire departments taken together have single digit H-indices. I'm sure they're great teachers and all, but...
$25K+/yr for the same sort of de facto non-academic retired/shifted-from-industry instructors you can get at any coding bootcamp or community college is robbery. Especially when the state school next door is about the same price and has a real faculty still pushing the edges of the field.
While I agree regarding about the awfulness of SWEs who can't write or communicate (which is most of them), college credit hours are too valuable to be wasted on humanities courses, particularly when humanities topics are far more amenable to self-study than STEM topics.
> particularly when humanities topics are far more amenable to self-study than STEM topics.
Really? I feel exactly the opposite, especially for CS. How do you become a good writer without feedback from a good writer (or, at least, critical reader)?
CS is an outlier. I imagine mathematics could be a good outlier as well. Its probably easier to find someone to help criticize your writing as opposed to getting your hands on expensive scientific / engineering equipment (both because of cost and regulations) however.
>[T]he content of the course is usually presented in whole or in part by the students themselves. Instead of using a textbook, the students are given a list of definitions and theorems which they are to prove and present in class, leading them through the subject material.
> "How do you become a good writer without feedback from a good writer (or, at least, critical reader)?"
Software developers have to communicate with our co-workers and write documents continually anyway so it's not much additional effort to observe the clarity, effectiveness and persuasiveness of what one is writing or even solicit feedback. You also get to observe colleagues and leaders who are good (or not) at writing and learn from their output. Being a competent communicator becomes more or less a requirement as one rises through the ranks, for both managers and senior technical individual contributors, so it's best to make a virtue out of necessity and hone your writing skills in the workplace.
You’re assuming a baseline at or above those intro courses. I’ve had engineers who don’t know how paragraphs work, or whose vocabulary and reading comprehension seems to have stunted at middle school.
Those people are usually stuck as juniors without formal education because they’re not at the point where self-teaching is possible.
> "You’re assuming a baseline at or above those intro courses. I’ve had engineers who don’t know how paragraphs work, or whose vocabulary and reading comprehension seems to have stunted at middle school."
If they're that poorly educated, then they'll be floundering in college humanities courses too so I'm not sure how that's a counterargument. Spending credit-hours on remedial English courses is even worse value for money.
People always trot out this canard but you should look at how few actual degrees get awarded. cultural gender studies only produces about 15,000 degrees[1] compared to nearly 42,000 for Computer Science [2].
The problem here really isn't unmarketable degrees. It's low wage jobs that require college-educated workers.
Also - in my subjective opinion as someone who has been in the workforce for nearly 20 years: that Gender Studies student is going to be a better writer than the STEM major with a B.S. Too often they barely capable of professional writing. 90% of the good technical writing I see is done by less than 10% of the engineers. And the best writing I see is from the self-taught people who got a History major or something like that. Being able to produce a 100-level college paper is just table stakes.
I have no idea what they study in this degree. But I assume it is based in part on philosophy/ethics, history and social sciences.
To me gender studies in particular seems to be an overly specific field to warrant such a high number (comparatively). I'm also very suspicious of its implementation (and I say that reluctantly as a feminist).
That said, I think there is huge value in philosophy/ethics but also in history and social sciences.
We need more smart, scientifically minded people studying these things globally and generating results, because we suffer from a severe lack of meaning and rational discourse.
To me it seems like half-baked ideology, fundamentalism, religion, cynical propaganda and tribalism are suppressing the advancement and refinement of our value systems and the resulting long-term goals of our societies.
While today's youth and intellectuals are squabbling over superficial things like gender pronouns, the powerful greedily disregard their responsibilities (at best) in the name of self interest. They're not only ignoring the consequences but actively try to discredit everything that gets in their way, even scientific fact, without repercussion!
People are still getting, murdered, mutilated and enslaved/oppressed and nature is starting to beat down hard on everyone, while the media and politics only further the divide and stir unrest by fighting over attention.
What value systems do we have today? Many base theirs still on provably toxic, incoherent and cynical ideologies like Marxism, Neo-Liberalism, Nationalism, Imperialism, Social Relativism, religion and so on. And in the middle we have a huge gaping "meh": An unreflective hodgepodge of tribalistic, after-the-fact values resulting in a pessimistic, regressive mindset: full of conservative nay-saying and hostile cancel-culture.
None of this is good enough and I feel like we are not advancing, but regressing. And none of this is solved by having more CS graduates who end up tuning the knobs on some ERP-system, analyzing customer data or building marketing websites.
Are these even people solely majoring in gender studies? That seems to be the sort of degree that might work as a double-major with something more general and practical. Perhaps there may be even a handful of CS/gender studies double majors.
Totally agree that liberal arts folks take an unfair beating -- the skills they develop are often more valuable than Computer Science skills, which are mostly unused. Very few of my colleagues have wielded any of the math or other skillsets that are core to Computer Science. Honestly, for 80% of developer or IT jobs, CS is just a hazing ritual to filter the weak.
I used to be the sponsor of an intern program and I'd say based on my experience is that, like anything else, ymmv with programs. One of the schools that I used to get folks from have a very good English, History, Caribbean Studies, and African Studies program, and the students are awesome. Some of the other programs have lower standards or are less mature, (or are landing zones for people who wash out of things) and the students suffer for it.
This happens for all things though. At my alma mater, the Business school was a recruiting funnel for big-5 accountants had a strict GPA requirement. So the frat boys and others would squeak out with an Economics degree. At another school, the Classics department was fossilized and core classes were solely graded on a bunch of multiple choice exams virtually unchanged for 30 years... you can imagine what type of student is attracted to that.
20 years ago was pretty viable but seems to be dwindling. I'm knowledgeable about finance majors so Ill use that as an example. The top 10% will do fine and make decisions while managing others money. The next 20ish percent will be salesman selling funds to others. The remainder will be writing business requirements so technology can automate their job
Very few people I know actually have careers directly related to their undergrad majors.
I majored in Creative Writing and interdisciplinary (politics, philosophy, and economics) studies. Currently working as an applied AI researcher and about to go back to get my phd in AI as well. There are many paths to take. Often being different helps you stand out. Having a humanities and social science background is just as important and useful as a strong tech and quantitative background.
My first tech job, I was the only English major in the candidate pool. Turns out being able to communicate well and being articulate is also super useful.
"Currently working as an applied AI researcher and about to go back to get my phd in AI as well" : You're probably in the top 2% of intelligence, that's a huge advantage over most everyone else. People who are closer to the average may need to take more conventional paths to succeed.
There is no shortage of liberal arts majors who went to coding bootcamps and are now working as software developers, even if only a minority of them are in something as cutting-edge as AI research.
It definitely happens, but we shouldn't make it look easier than it is. I agree it's one of the fields where you don't need a formal education / diploma so in that sense the barrier to entry is indeed low.
While flattering that's not true in my case. It's fair to point out that my story is not conventional but I disagree that we assume that its intelligence or some other individualistic features that primarily determine success.
I went to a vocational school high school in a underprivileged community where college was not reality for most students( < 30% of student went to college). I dropped out of CS in undergrad because I lacked basic math skills most students have. My career path was IT analyst -> project manager -> data scientist -> applied AI. It took about ten years of self study, work, and some luck to get to where I am today. And I am nowhere near done learning and growing (hence going back for a phd at 32).
For many their paths will be non-linear especially if they come from underprivileged backgrounds. I had a colleague who went back to do his undergrad at 29 after work 10 years as line chef and found success in his mid thirties.
It's problematic that we conflate price for value and that the purpose of college is career training. Ideally college would be free or heavily subsidized like it is in many other countries.
A strong liberal arts training is valuable in producing a more educated populace. For me, coming from a small community, my biggest fear was being stuck working at my terrible high school. The main value of college for me was imagination. Being able to imagine myself not confined by my circumstance was far more impactful in my life than many of the marketable skills that I picked along the way.
I agree many people can study law / arts or even nothing at all and just do a bootcamp (or even just study at home without a bootcamp) and become a software engineer / data analyst / etc.
But the closer you are to the average, the harder it will probably get to successfully make those switches. Someone who is 30 and finished liberal arts has a big psychological hurdle that works against him when he'll try to switch occupations. Self doubt often creeps, sunk cost fallacy etc.
Now the closer you are to average in iq / will power / whatever it is that determines success in engineering, the harder making this switch gets, especially when you're not in your 20s anymore.
So to sum up my point is yes everything is possible in theory, but no - we are not created equal. We differ greatly by intelligence, background, emotional intelligence, our ability to change etc etc. The more closer you are to the average part of the curve the smarter you have to play the hand you were dealt.
> Very few people I know actually have careers directly related to their undergrad majors.I majored in Creative Writing and interdisciplinary (politics, philosophy, and economics) studies.
I strongly feel that path is only an affordable luxury if you come from a upper middle class background and up. Most people can't afford to experiment with higher education given its high monetary cost. You guys might not agree, but qzx_pierri has a point.
I'm conflicted in responding to this. What you described was not my experience. I come from an underprivileged background and was fortunate to escape my social location. Part of it was luck though which is not replicable.
But I agree that it is harder to take risks coming from a low-income background where the cost of bad choices is amplified. Risk taking is risky though. That's the tragedy, it's hard to escape your social location incrementally. But at the same time for each success story there are many that don't succeed whose stories we don't hear.
I usually tell students to double major (or minor) if they are privileged to go to college. We as a society have moved away from the idea of renaissance person who has experience in many disciplines towards hyper-specialization. It makes it hard to adapt when everything around you is bound to change.
> I usually tell students to double major (or minor) if they are privileged to go to college. We as a society have moved away from the idea of renaissance person who has experience in many disciplines towards hyper-specialization
We moved away from that because higher education has gotten exponentially more expensive. I'm sure there are some valid reasons for that (e.g. increasing graduate student TA pay?) as well as terrible ones (e.g. an increase in both administrative execs along with administrative exec pay), but that's what's directly hurting the motivation for experimentation. Only the well-to-do have that privilege now. For others, it's risk and not harmless experimentation.
That's, I suppose, the view in "certain parts of the worlds".
In some other parts of the world, it is considered meaningful to learn a subject because one is passionate about it, and therefore is not a "waste of life".
Additionally, consider that some non-STEM degrees may produce trained thinkers (e.g. philosophy), which may turn to STEM careers in an indirect way; I've witnessed this on both sides - employees (careers) and employers (hiring).
If you think the crisis does not affect STEM degree holders, you are mistaken. There was a study commissioned by OPSE (Ontario Society of Professional Engineers). The findings directly contradict this oft-repeated wisdom that STEM degrees (or at least T and E in STEM) are a guarantee of a good life. If you have the time, I recommend that you read the full report. Here are some excerpts:
> only 29.7 per cent of employed individuals in Ontario with bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers.
> A further 37 per cent worked in professional positions that normally require a university degree.
> Those who were not working as engineers and were working in positions that don’t necessarily require a degree made up fully 33.3 per cent of the total.
In other words, there are more people with engineering degrees who work in jobs not requiring any degree at all, than there are people working in engineering.
A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out pretty darn fine.
It's not. Conscientious is a very specific set of behaviours.
I was offering an easy answer to the confused wondering of the Atlantic article. The path to success is known. Apparently not as well known as I would have thought. No need to point to the fact that the heterogeneous mess of a "College Degree" as being not a factor.
Yes, there's lots of ways to not succeed. Why not do a very little bit of shallow research and shout out to the roof tops what actually does work?!
This is one of the most underrated questions, despite how often it is asked, and it's a shame how many truly flip answers it gets whenever someone asks it.
Wealthier parents will buy homes there and donate/invest in local schools, which will afford a better education to their kids that, along with better networking, will increase the chances of being financially successful of their kids.
I think that's a terrible answer, sorry, and is pretty much what I mean. I somewhat agree with Taleb that wealth begets education, not the other way around. The special thing about good school districts is not the schools themselves, and the special thing about schools is not necessarily their budget: Some of the worst performing schools have the highest budgets.
But lack of things and capital will never get you a good life. If you are starving, no matter what you put in or how kind you are to others, you cannot have a good life. If you are home insecure, you cannot have a good life. Period.
I'm going to define "good life" to mean food, housing, and health security.
While you're right that nothing is guaranteed, the wealthier you are, the more you can guarantee these basic needs.
Even me, being in tech making around 6 figures, I haven't achieved my definition of a good life. This is because if I lose my job, the basic needs I listed cannot be maintained.
However, if you do not need to work (i.e. CEOs, billionaires, etc.), you are more likely to have your basic needs for a good life met for the rest of your life even if you lose your "job".
What I'm trying to say is that having things and lots of capital can very much get you to my aforementioned definition of a "good life".
I think we're getting ahead of ourselves with these philosophical questions of what a "good life" is. First, let's meet everyone's basic needs: food, housing, and health. Because those needs are clearly not met.
Is anyone in the USA actually starving? That's a common thing brought up, but calories are so cheap in the US that most poor people are actually morbidly obese, not starving. Even if you were starving, you could easily subsist panhandling at some traffic intersection. How long does it take to panhandle $10? An hour or two? And with that you could buy a 15 pound bag of rice which is like a months' worth of carbs.
Yes, absolutely. The idea that nobody should starve because they can stroll up to an intersection and fill their pockets is based on a lot of assumptions that are simply untrue.
The US is huge, some people would have to hitchhike quite far to get to a high-traffic area. There's also no guarantee of receiving any handouts at all, so I'm not sure I'd use the word "easily" (or even "possible"). And after hitchhiking and begging all day, praying for a few bucks to buy rice, you're not actually going to want to buy rice. You're going to want alcohol, or something fatty and sugary, or just plain drugs.
Your framing of this problem trivializes a terrible, dehumanizing experience, and is out of touch with the reality of the impoverished middle-American.
- refrigeration or other means of preserving the prepared food
- a secure place to store your month's food supply from other hungry people and/or cleaners
- mental health while you eat the same plain rice with bare your hands for a month and society judges you for "not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
There's a big difference between "starvation" and "hunger"/"food insecurity".
You can make all the excuses you want, but nobody is dying of starvation in the USA. The number of annual starvation deaths in the US is so small we don't even track it, and the people that do die of starvation aren't starving because they are poor, but sick (i.e. cancer makes them stop eating).
I'm not advocating a plain rice diet 24/7. I'm just saying calories are so cheap in America that obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than starvation.
Furthermore, even the poorest in the US have access to the things in your list if they want them.
My guesstimate is more than 50% become socialists.
There's nothing worse than can happen to a student.
Those individuals are practically doomed and guaranteed to have a worse life than those who didn't go.
496 comments
[ 0.41 ms ] story [ 360 ms ] thread- Don't do pre-university in high school but prepare for "higher job education" in high school. Graduate at 17.
- Do a "higher job education", speed it up (instead of 4 years do 3 years) and graduate at 20. Do some web dev/UX-based degree (they exist and speedups are possible, provided you're pro-active).
- Get a job grind away for 3 to 5 years, learn about investing and invest most of the money.
- If you want to go deeper in computer science, because the craft is beautiful then follow a master degree in security.
I'd have missed out on a lot of spiritual/some social development that I wouldn't have gotten at "higher job education" but did get at uni (as I did that for 6 months, a different degree though). However, compared to that, I now have a career setback of 7 years.
Apprentices start working one day a week and going to school four. They end up working four days a week and going to school one. Apprentices can switch to a more academic track, at a technical school or university, if they get the desire.
When they finish with their apprenticeship, not only do they already have horizontal ties with their classmates, but they also have vertical ties with their business, its clients, and the master tradesmen who conducted the classroom component and oversaw the theoretical and practical exams.
It's brilliant. And is there any profession that can't be done this way?
"Can't" because those are the rules we've established. But both of those professions seem like they be perfect for apprenticeships (they were at one point in history). It's not like studying the literature isn't or can't be a part of apprenticeship curriculum.
Unlike in the US where you first do 4 year of pre-med/pre-law, in continental Europe med and law students start learning on the job early.
I've dealt with a lot of trades people, and the ones who are my age (mid 50s) tend to be hobbling and broken. On the other hand I could see it work for things like the "lesser" health care trades such as dental hygienist.
Government: “Let’s give everyone X!”
Over time the value of X is diluted, loses its status signaling, and overall quality degrades.
Successful people move to Y.
(Although, here in the UK at least, the quality of degrees genuinely does vary by university in a way that roughly corresponds to their rankings. I know that's an unfashionable observable but I have seen enough degree programs at different universities to know it's likely true unless I happen to have seen an atonishingly unrepresentative sample. Partly this is self fulfilling because lower ranked universities are forced to take less good students and the level of the programme has to be adjusted accordingly, but part of it really is to do with quality of teaching.)
On our team we had a guy from ENA and he was the son of a French diplomat and a British mother - we quickly learnt he did not need any hand holding.
I'd say a Master's is the new BA/BS. With everyone getting an undergrad degree via online schools, or via 6+ years of undergrad college, it's ability to filter is weak. A brick-and-mortar Master's serves as a way to differentiate from that pack; I'm not sure what an online Master's equates to.
Georgia Techs OMSA, OMSCS, UT Austin Masters in DS, CS online.
I've interviewed and worked with so many PhD from top tier schools and it's astounding to me that someone can spend 6+ years studying a quantitative science, at a school like MIT or Harvard and still not have a basic understanding of statistics, and worse be incapable of genuinely understanding any of the quantitative tools they used for years.
The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research, they simply know how to mechanically replicate the processes you need to survive in academia today.
I find sometimes a PhD can come with very ingrained attitude issues. I recall working for a company with a new-recruit development program where really the only way to fail out was through attitude issues. One of the people who oversaw the program mentioned that she's only ever seen people with PhDs and higher fail out over this issue.
I also think it's unrealistic to expect PhDs to have a "basic understanding of statistics" unless they specifically studied it. I would be shocked and dismayed to see a PhD statistician misunderstand basic statistics; I wouldn't blink if a PhD mathematician or physicist made basic statistical errors. It's hard enough to achieve research-level mastery of one domain in five years, and many mathematicians and physicists (most?) do not need stats.
If you're talking about fields like psychology or sociology, I personally disagree with the expectations they're held to. I believe we would have less of a reproducibility crisis if research projects had statistician coauthors and peer reviewers, rather than just PhDs for whom statistics is not a core competency. That would be fairer and more realistic.
Finally, to be blunt it's hard for me to take this comment seriously when you say something like this:
> The current generation of PhDs don't know how to do any kind of real research
Heh.
A PhD degree does generally prove expertise in whatever the subject of your dissertation was and provides access to a couple of networks. Not always guaranteed, but if someone has a PhD I generally expect that they are at least competent at whatever their dissertation was about. And I've only been burned once.
The value of the expertise & set of networks, though, can range from "extraordinarily valuable" to "worse than useless".
In STEM fields the expertise & network is usually at least good enough to keep you busy with decent-paying work for a career or so.
In CS it's usually good enough to get you either a 100K job with lots of freedom or a regular old 300K job at a big tech. So, not really worth doing if your goal is just maxing out lifetime earnings, but certainly there are worse outcomes. From there you're on your own, though.
In many of the humanities... not so much.
Luckily, I knew this when I started my PhD program, because of an oversupply of mentors and role models within my own family. Also, I was planning on carving out my own niche anyway because I'm a punk. But it's not for the faint of heart.
Still, I'm skeptical about modifying PhD education to turn it into a "credential" that comes with an employment guarantee. Part of academic freedom is the freedom to study something that nobody cares squat about. Also, many of the people who are attracted to doing that, are unlikely to prosper in a mainstream career anyway.
For myself, I realize that becoming a programmer after high school might actually have been better from a lifetime earnings standpoint, but it assumes that I would actually have survived an entry level job in a code factory or IT department.
(Source: I work at Google, yet still see life as often confusing and sometimes terrifying)
More discussion on "the root of this" might lead to the above changing.
If you don't have that foot in the door you are usually spending a few years working for "Exposure" or "Networking opportunities." Sometimes for minimum wage or less. Unless the job is so hard that it's constantly churning workers. I'm sure a lot of jobs will take you off the street with no experience, but they will be dangerous and/or unpleasant.
Naturally when generalizing there will be exceptions. But that was essentially the rule when I got out of college. 2+ years experience prerequisite for most "Entry-Level" positions.
https://8thlight.com/blog/ryan-verner/2019/01/15/evolution-o...
But it is confusing are 8th Light acting as a source of training for other companies or just internal use.
How many years is it 4 / 5 what certification do you get at the end?
Why are you using "trade" terminology normally those doing "advanced apprenticeship" where associate professions and calling us "apprentices" would have got you a hard look.
when I did mine in the UK I was a Junior member of the IMECHE on the path way to full chartered (PE) membership
It does seem a bit light how long is the apprenticeship
If FANG companies where serious about training / diversity this is what they should be doing take bright high school kids at 18/19 and sign them up for a proper 4/5 year apprenticeship.
Personally, when I look for a job, I'm not willing to commit to 30-40 years. I think that part would have to change as well.
Apprenticeships for things like plumbers and electricians pay a decent wage interspersed with education.
On the long term a Ph.D may do better than a Master Electrician, but in the short term it's a way better deal. My friend out of HS who started working for Nissan and then Infinity was making 60k+ before he was 21. He's capped at around that much -- like 60-70k -- but most of our high-school friend circle wasn't making that kind of money until our late 20s (and at least one became a teacher, and still doesn't get that much in terms of pure cash comp).
Perhaps that is by design - companies are wary of investing time and money training junior employees because they can just leave before the investment pays for itself?
Not sure what the answer is here; just playing devil’s advocate.
When public unions became a thing in the 1960s and 1970s, they systematically excluded Black people, for example.
Even in the US South, the vast majority of millennials and gen Z are not racist. They aren't in political power yet, but in the next 20 years or so, they will be and the zeitgeist of the area will finish its shift (even the people currently in power are abolitionists compared to the previous generations). Travel the world and you'll see that (perhaps outside some European countries) the US of today is just about the least racist country in existence.
Guilds/Unions formed today won't have the same issues as ones from 50-60 years ago because the general view of people today isn't what it was back then.
No matter what the "zeitgeist" is 20 years from now, guilds will still have the effect of artificially limiting the supply of labor to the fields they control, which has been a disaster for fields ranging from medicine to cosmetics.
But in an industrial union, as an example get hired by an automaker with a UAW contract (and not in a so called right to work state), you are a UAW member.
Also, it's weird that you call out guilds for being discriminatory but then give an example of discrimination in employment. We have fair employment laws to prevent this type of behavior and arguably could have "fair guild membership" laws if it became a problem.
It's fair to argue against guilds for driving up prices by limiting membership.
And employment discrimination laws won’t solve the problem because the discriminatory effect arises from the legal practice of protecting existing members at the expense of potential new entrants.
There was a very clear example of this recently in Chicago. Lori Lightfoot explained that she wouldn’t pursue police funding cuts because under the union contracts, cuts would have to be made from newer employees first. (Last in First out.) That would mean that 2/3 of the cuts would be Black and Hispanic officers, even though less than half of the overall force is Black and Hispanic.
I'm lucky enough to come from a country with free decent universities, so maybe it's easy for me to say, but I can't even put a price on how my education changed every single part of how I think and understand the world. That it prepared me for a well-paying job is just a nice side-effect.
How well do you think the misinformation that laid the foundation for the political shitstorm the US is in now could have taken hold if most people had a college education?
Yes, especially if all or at least most colleges considered it a high priority to educate people in what used to be called citizenship.
Next government: “Let’s charge everyone for X!”
Next government: “Let’s overcharge everyone for X to the point where the price equals or exceeds the value!”
The purpose of free higher ed for all is not to guarantee everyone a good life–it is to try and give everyone an equal chance at a good life. If higher ed is highly correlated to escaping poverty and upward economic mobility, then college costs raising at a rate 11 times faster than average income is a form of classism.
We used too. A high school education meant something to my grandparents.
OTOH, I can imagine the HS-level Physics books were very different from the ones we studied with, with different subjects given different depths.
Do you have a high school education? The education I got in H.S. had a big impact on my life. I couldn't imagine being done with school at 14 and thinking that was equivalent to 4 years of High School.
Probably because a high school diploma has been so normalized that it is seen as the baseline. But that underscores the problem. Of course everyone having a high school diploma devalues it. That's part of why its seen as the default. If we make undergraduate education a similar default, it will just devalue that too. Not to mention what happens to the people who can't complete an undergraduate degree. They become even further marginalized in society.
It is faulty reasoning to notice that a bachelors degree correlates with good outcomes and then conclude that more bachelors degrees means more good outcomes. Good jobs are zero-sum. If there are more people who satisfy the requirements for good jobs, the requirements just increase. It's not like most office jobs require a bachelors degree, the fact that so many people have them makes them an effective zero-effort filter.
I remember a native German poster on hn commenting on the subject "funny how the its the brown skinned Germans, who end up in the lower tier schools"
You know that meritocracy was seen as a bad thing when it was coined.
The problem in the U.S. is that not all public schools are equal, so the "merit" to get into a certain school/scholarship is at least partly tied to your social-economic status.
For instance in my area, all public schools have removed arts/music/foreign language, but in the nicer neighborhoods PTA, boosters, and fundraisers have added those removed subjects back with parent donations. So you have a situation where when it comes to vote for a small tax increase to help our schools, many people are confused as their kids go to a public school with everything they need. These are schools in the same school district. New, upscale homes can also pay directly for their public school in the form of Mello-Roos taxes.
It seems like a non-prediction that having more people with good education will enable new businesses.
You can read more about it in his essay here: http://paulgraham.com/wealth.html
Why not? Is there some economic axiom that states this? Can wealth not continue to increase? And can't wealth be used to create "good" jobs?
There also seems to be a scale issue when it comes to the availability of good jobs. That is, not all jobs can be good (i.e. high paying) and there is an essential order-of-magnitude difference between the number of high paying jobs and the number of low paying jobs required to make the economics work. So the proportion of good jobs is effectively fixed even on longer timescales.
I think most economists would say that is called the lump of labour fallacy.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lump_of_labour_fallacy
Without universal high school, the USA would still be a largely illiterate subsistence farming nation with high rates of poverty as defined at the global scale.
Even well-paying jobs in the trades require literacy and basic mathematics skills.
So, no, good jobs aren't zero-sum.
But the point is that we can't do away with K-12 schooling. Subsistence farming was, is, and will be a bad job.
College Algebra is required to enter a lot of trades. And not just because it's a requirement for the AS, but also because you actually do need to be able to understand the material in order to work in many trades. The students I tutor often fail college algebra, move on to their subject courses thinking they can tick off that useless stuff later, then realize they need a college algebra tutor after failing those courses because it turns out they need to understand how to interpret a table or graph of a function in order to do the job.
College Algebra is really hard for a lot of people. I can say with almost certain confidence that, even with extensive tutoring, they would never make it through that course without years of practice reasoning about mathematical objects in Algebra I and Algebra II and Geometry.
I think people who are naturally talented in STEM massively underestimate the amount of practice some people need to pick up the quantitative skills needed to enter many trades.
- Which aspects of algebra do the students have the most trouble understanding?
- What are some good examples of tables, graphs, and functions the students need to interpret?
The basic concepts of variables and functions. I can't stress enough that most of your high school facebook friends posting these memes are doing so non-ironically: https://www.google.com/search?q=math+was+great+until+they+ad...
Which, I guess, means "everything". But really getting over that first conceptual hurdle is the hardest part. After that, it's a lot more hand-holding through exercises/practice than trying to surmount a fundamental conceptual barrier.
> What are some good examples of tables, graphs, and functions the students need to interpret?
Tables and ratios and rates of change abound in the trades. Especially anything related to electricity or water. You really need at least a conceptual understanding of variables and functions to understand a lot of the material.
Also, most tradesmen will want to run their own business at some point (that's where the money is), and tables/graphs/functions abound.
If you're struggling with college algebra, odds are good that you're uncomfortable:
1. interpolating values from a table (1/16 : x, 2/16 : y, ..., 1: z; oh no, I need to know the value for 3/32 and it's not on the table!),
2. evaluating a function at a point ("the equation tells me xs from ys and zs, but I need zs from xs and ys!").
Pick a trade and (1) and (2) are fundamentally necessary skills. Smart phone calculators obviate this some-what, but it's still important to have at least a conceptual understanding even if the mechanical skill of doing the math atrophies. Otherwise you won't even know how to use the calculator properly. See this all the time.
The money thing in particular is super important, though. I do a lot of example problems that basically boil down to "if your fixed cost is $X and the equipment needs to be replaced every 2 years, and if you charge $Y, will you make a profit? What is the smallest value of Y that will make a profit? Etc." Students really struggle with this sort of thing, especially if you throw in seasonal variable with fixed debt payments ("how much do I need to make in the summer months to cover the loan payments in the winter months?"). Questions like this are at the heart of college algebra.
Like, would not be surprising if lots of small businesses fail because the owner doesn't do the work of making sure the unit economics can cover amortized costs, and then end up defaulting on their loan.
TBH even gig economy participants need to be able to do the more basic stuff from college algebra...
this is true if you look at the sticker price, but does the actual cost for a low-income family grow at that rate? I'm having a hard time finding a source that shows by year what a bottom quartile family would have paid for tuition at an in-state public university or an elite institution.
Would it better if stores listed loaf of bread at $300 and then people can negotiate the price from there?
they don't put a clear price because they take a lot of different factors into account. take a look at this tuition estimator for vassar: https://studentfinancialservices.vassar.edu/calculator/quick...
the grant is calculated based on your family's income, home value, savings, investments, number of children, and a couple other data points. they can't give an exact number until they see your FAFSA. it sucks that this is so complicated, but I argue most of this is necessary to fairly calculate grants. two different households making $60k might have wildly different abilities to pay for tuition.
Kids are passed along without meeting the standards of the grade or degree so that the institution does not look bad.
You may be too young to remember when this was the crises du jour and the No Child Left Behind program, etc.
Not everyone can get earn a PhD. Not everyone can pass the rigors of high school. Not everyone can run a 4 minute mile either.
What I am not saying is that education hasn't been devalued, or standards haven't changed, or anything else around the quality of education–simply that an education better than not in the u.s..
I don't think I believe more education can ever be a bad thing. But the business of education in the US is an absolute nightmare that corrupts the spirit of learning it ought to protect, and I agree more of that business will not make things better for students.
distinguish between education and schooling
And absolutely vital for a healthy democracy.
Perhaps, but you shouldn't make the mistake of equating schooling and education.
Just because people born to the right family, who are free of crippling disability and disease, and possess the innate traits that enable one to be successful in the workplace also happen to go to school does not mean that going to school will change the traits you were born with, reverse the disabilities you have, and see you adopted by another family.
Funny that was missed when it is the first thing you learn when you head down the road to attaining a degree.
It is the people that are seen as going beyond that education baseline that are the elite, and get the best careers and the most success generally (ignoring other factors for the purpose of this conversation). As you increase the baseline, what it takes to be elite also increases accordingly. I think we can all agree that it is inherently true that not everyone can be elite, in the same way that it's impossible for everyone to be above average, which is what I think you're getting at.
I think what this view may fail to consider is that the benefits of the baseline come to resemble what was previously considered elite as overall wealth increases. Middle class people now have larger homes, more vehicles, more luxury etc. than the lower-tier elites (ignoring the billionaire class here) did 100 years ago. That increase of the baseline living standard is tied to, though very much lags, the baseline of education.
Put another way, we can not eliminate the relative gap between the baseline and the elite, but, in absolute terms, as the baseline comes to meet what was previously elite in education the baseline well-being and standards of living also come to meet what was previously elite.
Hiring in general is done poorly and I understand why. It's hard to differentiate between so many candidates especially for entry level positions where a lack of job history makes it difficult to evaluate talent. So it makes sense that employers optimize for lazy signals like completion of a degree.
In general universal education is far better for a country.
It doesn't make sense.
It's a shame, because I loved (and continue to love) higher education.
If anything, I'd say the rate of people attending college despite not wanting to can only have increased since then. The assumption that college is an absolute necessity for a comfortable middle-class life has only in the last few years come into serious question, and still has yet to face anything like the inquisition it deserves.
Yes, we tend to pay a lot to go to college, and yes, a lot of us feel like we must do it. A lot of choices factor into how much you pay - community college can reduce this, going to a lesser known school, etc. However, it’s an investment in yourself. For some of us, that investment works out really well. Others may struggle to get that awesome job after college.
Judging by the number of people who don't show up to class or otherwise just "get by", it's absolutely true. People "go to college" because they're told it's their meal ticket into the middle class. This is the point of the article.
Ask the average person if they'd rather pay to have the paper degree and not have to attend any classes, or get the education for free but not receive any paper credentials. You'll have your answer.
I mean, I've heard of this happening a lot in community college, but in my private university I didn't regularly see this behavior, and certainly not in the upper level classes.
This is an interesting thought, however I don't think it is a good test for whether someone wants to be in college/uni or not. It is reasonable to enjoy the education and be realistic about the value of the paper certificate at the same time.
The overall point about social pressures etc. is well taken though.
A lot of people enjoy the social aspect of college (from parties to having a cohort that is interested in the same things they are).
The money issue roughly fell into three buckets: 1) students not worrying about money because they have rich parents, 2) students not worrying about money because they have student loans, and 3) students worrying a lot about money because they have student loans.
From my experience going to undergrad at a state university in the midwest, a lot of students would prefer to have a well paying job immediately after high school and not go to college. However, a lot of those same students would rather go to college than stay in their small hometown where job prospects are bleak.
It would help people to realize any thing one does has an expiry date to it. This is why you need to have a system to remain consistent at some broad goals. Things like good eating, exercise, personal finance, relationships, reading and learning have to be done consistently, and have to be done throughout your life. You won't be good at life, if you don't do some of things regardless of the age, and place you are in.
The loss is in assuming College Degree as an aristocratic right. If you think this way you will soon realize there is nothing special about reading a few books between ages 18 - 22 and doing no learning after that for decades.
To me primary purpose of education is initiation. College degree should be treated as a good head start as an initiation. Nothing more, Nothing less.
I'm talking more on the lines of normal people, from normal families. For people like us, education means some thing very different. Its like initial exposure to an experience we must maintain all life.
I would disagree. College education is absolutely not required to get through life. And it should be required even less than it is. There are some professions for which degrees are super useful. But most people doing degrees are going into professions that just require any degree and could easily be done without one.
To me College screwed my long haul instead.
When I graduated, I couldn't find any legal jobs (I could find some jobs masquerading as contracts, that employers offered to avoid paying taxes properly), because whenever I did, the person that got hired was someone else that DIDN'T go to college, but had 4 years of experience more than me.
After some time working (like I said, as "contractor"), and I finally had some experience, my issue was that people hired were either younger with same experience, or my age but more experienced.
And then of course there was the issue that my job selection was extremely limited, I could only take jobs that would let me pay my massive student debt, it felt to me my life wasn't much different than the one of a literal slave, being forced to work into very specific jobs because I couldn't take a job that paid less, or take my time to find a better job, etc...
Now I am 33, I have a wife, don't live with my parents anymore, have a reasonable income.
Still can't get unemployment benefits, because never been employed.
Still I am not even called to many job interviews, because "no experience".
Or one time, I was called to a job interview in a big asian multinational that had a Brazillian gamedev office, they been complaining on media for months they were not finding people qualified for the job, the job title was exactly what I had a degree for, the HR loved me and all.
Then when the last step left was for them to get authorization from higher ups... the authorization didn't came.
Know why?
Well, because although I had a degree, they didn't cared about the degree, what they cared about, was experience.
So no, college is NOT "obviously" part of anything unless you mean being "obviously" part of crushing student debt that force thousands into conditions that in my country are literally legally slavery if the owner of the debt was also the employer (we have a law named "employment analogous to slavery", one of its points is that employing people to have them repay their debt to you is considered slavery).
Not just any higher education, though, but specific professional degrees that grant access to supply managed markets. That part seems to be often missed when this topic comes up.
I recall a Gallup study into the top 1% finding that something like 70% of the top 1% have a professional degrees (doctors, lawyers, etc.). The remaining portion was comprised of more people with high school or less than those with only a bachelor degree, suggesting that a bachelor degree alone does nothing to improve your prospects. Which goes against the common thinking.
But is also echoed in the general economy. With the rise of post-secondary attainment, incomes have held stagnant. If there was a financial advantage gained though higher education itself, not through supply management, incomes would be rising.
But spends more time on an anecdote about the author's son to demonstrate that "Happiness is possible without College", which is a different matter entirely. And one would hope the latter is true, since 2/3 of the US population does not attend college.
This article is very light on content and I'm kinda surprised something this banal and content-less even made it to an actual publication.
Also, the guy's son graduated high school two years ago, he's 20-21 years old, practically everyone is happy at that age, let's hear about his life satisfaction at 40. That's ignoring the fact that two years is hardly enough time to evaluate the long term outcome of a major life decision.
To be clear, I don't think the author's son will grow up to be miserable, like the parent pointed out, most people don't have a college degree and most people aren't miserable. But this should be obvious.
"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied. And if the fool, or the pig, is of a different opinion, it is only because they only know their own side of the question."
lol
Not to mention the vast majority of humanity! One can get a lot out of a "college education," but there is a lot more to life than that.
"After his second harvest, with money in the bank, our son joined the Marine Corps, a dream he had had for several years. He finished boot camp and is now at infantry school in North Carolina. He wakes up at 4 a.m., is tired all the time—and is happy. He is, as a translation of the second-century Saint Irenaeus puts it, “a man fully alive.”"
Happiness is possible without college, but geeze, I think I'll pass on that road.
(On the other hand, I know people who have taken roughly that road; he discovered he didn't like ranching (and it didn't pay squat) and joined the Navy, spent 8 years and two deployments in. Seems to have worked out pretty well. On the other hand, he recently completed a bachelors at a for-profit school (that mostly exists to absorb GI-bill benefits, AFAICT) and wants to go back for a masters for some reason.)
I had this debate with myself when I was younger because I really like physical work but am probably better at knowledge work. The biggest reasons I work an office job is that they tend to pay much better than other work and it's easy to end up in a physical job that can take a bad toll on your body over time.
As far as webdev goes, you could do a bootcamp and be earning money within 6 months to a year. That's money that's hopefully going into your pension fund and earning interest while your peers are still in class.
Or you could learn to code using cheap and/or free resources. College isn't the only place to learn things nowadays and I think a lot of people haven't caught up with that yet.
I used to think nothing could beat the college experience for bonding but I think the formula of lots of people doing the same thing every day in a niche environment they want to be in is easily repeatable. I'm still in contact with digital nomads I hung out with in Bansko two years ago and I was only there for a month. But it was an intense month of seeing each other every day, just like college.
Oh and don't worry about not finding a dev job if you don't go to college. Employers are coming around slowly and there are lots of success stories out there: www.nocsdegree.com
Is a College Degree Worth It?
College Degrees are no longer worth it!
College Degrees - not worth the paper they're printed on.
A College Degree - what does it really get you?
And so on and so forth.
If bootcamps were a valid pathway into the profession at the time after I left high school I definitely would have foregone my Computer Science degree and gone down that route.
I'm glad attitudes towards them have shifted in the last few years - most of my friends in the profession work in companies that actively seek out applicants from bootcamps.
I would love more different avenues for people to come to software engineering, and I'm rooting for boot camps, but I'm also skeptical about how universal the benefits are. I think coding is much more of a learnable skill than many already in industry give it credit, but I also think it takes years, not weeks, to learn to do it well.
I tend to feel that under-emphasizing these things are why the software industry has so much of a problem with poor designs, low code quality, and missed deadlines.
Maybe it would be possible to create a two year degree that would fill in those gaps.
I think there is too much weight put on CS theory but it is valuable if you already have it through a degree.
Outside of FAANG and similar unicorn growth kind of companies nearly nobody else needs a new X or a different design of Y. I'd even go as far to say most of the time we don't even need to understand the internal of the tool itself.
Gut feel says upwards of 99% of companies just need existing solutions combined. I'd say 20% of the industry itself thinks they're actually apart of the 1% that are truly facing a problem nobody else has.
I've seen companies suffer from too much CS theory. They get caught up in the technical problems and the most ideal solutions instead of focusing on providing customer value.
We hear this through the many talks about premature optimization and reinventing the wheel but in the real world I hear a lot of individuals calling the work a hack when it isn't the most optimized solution.
- "University degree" is a heterogeneous thing. While there is such thing as non-economic value, the strictly economic value of a college education tends to cluster around a small subset of degrees.
- Many countries have enacted policies to increase proportion of people who get degrees. Far from fixing inequality, this has instead diluted the value of university degrees.
- All universities are not created equal. While it is possible (and even common) for employers to pay too much attention to the reputation of the school, it is also quite common for students to over-estimate the value of a no-name institution. I've found this to be moreso the case in the two European countries I've lived in for an extended period of time (France & England).
- The exorbitant debt incurred by university tuition in some countries (which need not be named, I think) means the ROI on the university degree has to also be exorbitant.
Have I missed anything?
Was this the purpose? I thought it was to raise living standards by improving productivity. By and large, broader education has been successful at that. (It went off the deep end, in recent years, with the proliferation of bullshit degrees.)
In the US, part of the problem is that by making education debts non-dischargable in bankruptcy, and by the aforementioned proliferation of degrees that may qualify as 'nice to have' rather than 'increase earning potential'.
The end result is a lot of people who got a college degree that doesn't really pay for itself, and instead leads to 20+ years of debt, or 10 years of indentured servitude to a non-profit.
I think a big part of the problem is that debt is so readily issued for degrees that overwhelmingly leave the recipient incapable of providing for society in gainful ways.
I assume lenders would take the degree being pursued, institution at which it’s being pursued and applicant’s academic history (and this likelihood of completing it) into account.
Currently, there is zero incentive to do that work.
https://www.savingforcollege.com/article/history-of-student-...
Nothing, and that's exactly why education debts need to be dischargeable like anything else.
Dischargeable loans makes loan companies have actual responsibility and consequences in deciding who to give loans to. Otherwise, they blindly give out loans (why not, there's no risk!), putting all that much money in the system, which college institutions are happy to absorb in higher tuition.
I’m not sure what the answer is, though I think an economic approach is key.
If you're still going to be paying your loan off in 7 years, bankruptcy would be an easy choice.
The debt doesn't just magically go away. Chapter 7 requires liquidating assets, and chapter 13 requires paying some loans back anyway. And besides, I don't see why loan companies couldn't require cosigners to reduce risk on these college loans.
Then you rent an apartment or buy a car. Are you implying you can't do this after bankruptcy? It's much easier to do these with a bankruptcy on your "record" than with a $1000 monthly payment.
If you've got an 800 score and no money, no one will give you a loan. If you've got a trash credit score, but an extra $1000 that isn't going to loans, then you can 'afford' to get fleeced on 36% 72 month auto loans for 7 years until your credit is rebuilt.
That $1000 is likely getting spent no matter what, either in repaying loans, or paying a premium over the market rate to get a landlord to agree to lease you an apartment instead of someone with an 800 score.
It would be interesting to see insurance companies have more skin in the game - we would probably start getting much more accurate breakdowns of ROI by major, degree, and school.
What America has now is a good system, where anyone can use these loans to pull themselves up.
What government or maybe banks need to invest is in more career counseling.
$393 is 15% of $2620 which annualizes to $31,512, which is about the median personal income for full-time workers (whoops, before taxes). ($222 is 15% of $17,760 annual, about the poverty line for two.) That's not a wildly big change over the current state.
How about 10% of taxable income?
> 10k graduating with a degree in a field with only 100 jobs/year needing that degree
What I'd live very much to avoid is having a centralized body which makes such decisions. Under my scheme, lenders who identify such fields will be reluctant to grant loans, but how they decide what's in the field, and what exceptions to make, the can do however they like.
The university takes on the risk, but they have much more information about their students and their degree programs than students, governments, or private lenders, so they're probably best placed to be making informed risk decisions. Under the current systems, the government and the student take on the risk, while the university and the private lenders get the rewards.
A large portion of those creating the tech are self educated.
Seems like that can’t be ‘hard to get into’.
Germany's interesting here, since they had/have Fachhochschulen (apparently translated to University of Applied Sciences). Some of which were very highly regarded, and offered a different focus that suited some people. Although after the Bologna Process, this difference is less clear, too.
There are pretty decent apprenticeships, but only so many people want to work trades regardless. It's not exactly a ticket to wealth or status like a degree might still be perceived.
Yes you're missing something.
My friends in the US all apply to a very large number of elite universities. In the UK I don't believe you're even allowed to apply to more than one elite university in the same year, and only a very small number of universities overall. One person I know in the US applied to 23 universities.
And then on top of that, in the UK all admissions for elite universities and most below that require an in-person interview, which the US (bafflingly) doesn't do.
I think I applied to one elite and two just below elite.
All of this means total applications in the UK are far fewer than in the US but each is more focused and more realistic which makes successful admissions seem higher. But really people who wouldn't have gotten in didn't apply in the first place.
> it seems extremely easy to get into a 'top' UK university
Also, what's with these scare-quotes? Are you skeptical that they're really top universities? They consistently top international rankings, alongside your best.
Not all, but at least premium ones do alumni-driven interviews.
When I applied to university a while ago the rule was that you can apply to 5 universities only, ie make 5 applications in total. Only exception was "clearing" but thats a different story
From what I've seen over the last decade, this is incredibly true in the United States, particularly with the rise of for-profit schools offering online degrees.
("Oh, and X has a Ph.D."
"Oh? Where from?"
"I think it's the University of Phoenix."
"Ok.")
Tuition in France is basically free from what I understood. Even if students over-evaluate the value of the school, the fact that it's free still makes it attractive. And I think that some universities are teaching only (no research) no?
There's no doubt that not having crippling debt is much better than having crippling debt. However, we have this cultural idea that being on the road to taking partial owneship of a small skilled labor business is inferior to being in a dead-end job with a 4-year degree. I fear that an over-emphasis on opening access to 4-year degrees implicitly reinforces this idea of 4-year degrees being universally better and that tradespeople have somehow settled for second-best, even if they have more income, a better work-life balance, and are providing absolutely essential services.
I know enacting social change is much much harder than throwing money at problems, but I wish America figured out a way to really strengthen the cultural admiration for the hard-working craftsperson archetype.
Pete Buttigieg took a lot of flak for pointing out that many jobs in America don't require a college degree, and there should be nothing shameful about learning a skilled trade instead of going to college. We have a vast over-supply of many college majors, and (I'm told) big shortages in many skilled trades. There are way too many people with 4-year degrees from top-100 schools working cash registers in retail, when they'd have far less debt and higher income (and a good chance of later becoming successful small business owners) if they'd gone to trade school instead of college.
It's honestly classist to push 4-year degrees so hard. There's something noble about optimizing your own happiness while providing valuable services, despite much of America considering skilled laborers to be a class below cashier workers with useless 4-year degrees. I wish we as a society could better appreciate skilled laborers.
We don't have much positive to show from decades of flooding the college tuition markets with cheap credit / crippling debt and implicitly pushing hard the notion that going to trade school is settling for second-best.
There's something to be said about removing the crippling personal debt from the act of flooding the education markets with money, but without cultural changes, I think a big effect would be further ballooning of college costs. I fear the crippling debt will just get hidden as accelerating the ballooning of government debt without moving the needle much on inequality.
no, what it's done is uncover the hypocrisy of the meritocracy underlying western narrative--when university degrees were exclusive to the upper class white guys, degrees exhibited a "meritocratic distinction". naturally, only smart and capable people got degrees, not just people in a fiercely-defended and exclusive club.
but when educational attainment became more wide-spread and democratic, the club moved on and abandoned the university degree as a useful in-group signal. economic value was with in-group membership, not in the degree itself, a decidedly unmeritocratic, and unequal, system.
it's made this relationship more apparent, elucidating why inequality has persisted despite wider degree attainment.
It's all about show and very little about substance.
Building a flashy web app and studying for interviews will get you further than anything you learn in school.
That's all.
It seems like people think you should be able to just check a few boxes, then slot into a 9-5 and have everything taken care of for you for the rest of your life.
Well, it doesn't work like that. Even after college you're still going to have to plan and think and take action to make things happen for you. It's not just all going to fall into your lap because you took a few classes in your early 20s.
I hope to not experience a repeat of those initial conditions.
i would die on the inside
Just like today, plenty of people struggled to make ends meet.
If you're not particularly ambitious, yes. The whole system runs on ordinary people's labor, and it's an authoritarian system: when you go to work, you're following orders. It shouldn't be on you to take constant initiative and exercise your intelligence in finding new orders to follow, new ways to subordinate yourself to someone else's goals.
If you want to treat people as subordinates, you have to take care of them, and yes, that means taking off the anxiety and cognitive load of potential unemployment.
If you want people to do all this thinking for themselves, why shouldn't they recognize they're being exploited and get rid of you and your system?
And yes, you are always free to get rid of any one company's system and start your own system (i.e. company). What people find when they do this is that with freedom comes a lot of responsibility.
That's fair, but while some kids would thrive going to work after college many more would be hampered by a lack of a college education for the rest of their lives.
Probably US specific but, in most schools, education sucks and all good colleges (not just super expensive; state schools, too) offer a solid STEM background to fix the damage after lousy schools. College should not be necessary, but in the US it kind of is.
So to make college optional, fix schools: reduce hours and drudgery, focus on consistent STEM background, give extra support to kids that excel in a subjext. My 2c.
Assuming you went to college for a marketable and "valuable" degree - by this, I mean a degree with a clear path to a somewhat stable career. Usually, if you don't have internships you've already shot yourself in the foot.
Plenty of people with family money and college still find ways to go bankrupt from addiction, real-estate woes or bad investments.
Some just don't care enough or have enough drive to be "successful".
Some who find success get involved with the wrong people, or think their source of money is an endless fountain and go broke or worse end up on the street.
Goodness do journalists write for simpletons these days...
Just to be sure: if you are young/new please don't take this as discouragement. The less it applies to you the better. And if you face discrimination then take pride in your accomplishments in spite of adversity.
But I find OP's assessment overly specific...
* insurance policy, where students use it to avoid limiting themselves to low-status and low-paying careers
* lottery ticket, the gateway to a "prestige" career track [1]
* status signaling mechanism, where young people flex their educational elitism [2]
And higher ed is arguably bad at what its supposed be good at - a delivery mechanism of relevant knowledge. If you have ever interviewed a fresh grad who didn't study "Cracking the Coding Interview" or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt, then you know what I am talking about.[3] The internet is the most effective information distribution delivery and it's much cheaper, no wonder the value of college is in question.
[1] Consulting, finance, corporate middle management, grad school
[2] How many times have you been on a date and you tell or ask the other person where they wen to college, what they majored in, etc
[3] Arguably, the standard that hiring managers set for new grads is too high. Perhaps it's the employer that should be training fresh grads, but that is not how the current job market works. I think about this a lot because it causes problems for both young people and employers.
Goodhart's Law.
> or did not have a few "side projects" under their belt
IME: end-of-course projects at places like MIT and Carneige Mellon are often much more impressive than the CRUD web app or copy-pasta Jupyter notebooks I tend to see from e.g. coding bootcamps or especially self-taught applicants. And students usually have a half dozen or more of those, in addition to internship projects.
Sometimes a self-taught person comes along with a genuinely impressive project, and I push hard to hire those folks. But for the most part it's silly little single-person-project web apps and such.
> The internet is the most effective information distribution delivery and it's much cheaper, no wonder the value of college is in question.
The questioning only really has a loud voice in places like the USA with horrendously expensive higher ed systems. I don't really hear a lot of griping about the cost of education or opining on internet alternatives when I'm in Munich or Vienna.
Very few students study at places like MIT and Carnegie Mellon. They typical CS program, even the typical "good but not exemplary" CS program, does not direct students to produce "projects" on nearly the same level. I even went to a college that has a well-regarded senior capstone project for its traditional engineering majors, but the CS equivalent felt far more low-effort and unconsequential. Among my classmates, the ones who had significant side projects and internship/co-op results were the ones with preferential outcomes and the ones who only had end-of-course projects to show were the ones with "typical" outcomes.
The non-flagship state uni a lot of my friends went to had fantastic project-based coursework in CS. Acceptance rate is like 70% and tuition is very affordable.
Agreed that ENG departments tend to do better at this, especially at mid-tier state schools. CS departments need to take project-based work and especially capstones much more seriously.
Electronics: https://www.google.com/search?q=6.115+final+projects
Interactive music: https://vimeo.com/user42907764
Product design: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RqKSAz3yxMM
All but the last of these were done in groups of 2-3 people. It might have been theoretically possible to graduate with only one big project, if you took machine learning, security (the final project for this one was finding an exploit in Firefox, but no actual code was required), and some heavy theory classes. Most people would have done at least 3-4 big projects like this.
There's also a growing anti intellectual movement in the US, you even see it here on hacker news. If you start with the premise that education is at best useless and at worse actively harmful of course the cost would be questioned.
In your view, what distinguishes the former from the latter? CS is not my primarily skillset, but I do know "how to program". And, because I'm a grad student, I want to do something with a very high impressive:time ratio, if that makes sense.
Hard to give a generic answer.
Basically, anything that makes me say "yeah there's no youtube tutorial for that, no public github repo you could copy ideas from, and you had to have solved a lot of difficult gritty problems in creative ways to get it to work".
For that reason, A lot of the most impressive projects I've seen demonstrates the potential of a new tech stack. Demonstrations of promise can be either really cool demos or else pieces of infrastructure that lower the barrier to entry/iteration time/etc.
Back when 3D printing and laser sintering where new technologies, here are examples of cool projects around that emerging stack:
* digging into the firmware and/or hacking around the firmware to fix some limitation of the machine. This is probably not relevant anymore, but was when 3D printers were still new and had annoying bugs.
* A domain-specific CAD-like tool that did a bunch of "physically possible" checks for certain types of objects by using numerical analysis to do a bunch of ad hoc checks. Fantastic project because you can look at it and say "if you took two years and did this in a more systematic way it'd be a great product"
* auto-generated statues/art
* etc.
NB: that would be a bit less impressive these days, because 3D printing is now mainstream and a lot of these projects can be done via copy-pasta development from github repos, or even by following a youtube tutorial.
What is your primary skillset, and what's an emerging capability in that space? How can you use software to either demonstrate the promise of that capability or else build useful infrastructure that could make that capability easier to access?
NB: this is mostly for undergrad and maybe non-thesis masters projects. If you're in a thesis masters program or phd program, focus on doing science. Pick a good advisor and listen.
What is great with MIT/CMU style projects is that they demonstrate a good knowledge of the fundamentals of engineering and often required a significant amount of learning on a very scoped subject to complete the project. That is something I want to hire for, because I know that even if these guys know nothing about my specific tech stack and problem space, they will be able to figure it out quick.
I repeated it a couple of times, bootcamp projects are often worthless, and more often than not the goal of the bootcamp is to manage to complete the project, which is identical to the one that the other 40 students completed. They are often made to be flashy and show (non-technical) hiring managers that they have the right applied skills to churn out code immediately, but I'm pretty sure a lot of bootcamp grads could not figure out how to translate their toy app to a different framework or ecosystem in any reasonable amount of time.
I think the deluge of undergrad degrees is the cause of this? a degree isn't a meaningful differentiate? rather just a expected baseline all prospective employees must have
Funnily enough that is effectively what happens in many cases anyway. You still need to shell out the 40k for the undergrad degree to even get the opportunity to learn on the job.
I went to college and grad school to learn.
The fact that most software developer jobs of the present day don't really make use of a college education says more about the profession of software development than the value of getting a degree. Software development is becoming a commoditized, blue collar job that anybody off the street can do and that will have long term impact on the market value of ordinary developers.
I don't think it's true. Colleges and education in general are teaching people. But it's more like drinking from a firehose.
But nobody cares about effort to retain what you drank from said firehose, so 90% to maybe 99% of it basically disappears into ether, unless you're in a profession that actually makes use of what you're taught.
I did. As did many of my classmates. I've found engineering fascinating since I was a child so I enjoyed the opportunity.
> How many times have you been on a date and you tell or ask the other person where they wen to college, what they majored in, etc
How is this "[flexing] educational elitism"? That is standard small talk to gauge another person's life experience and interests.
I was told from a young age college was about learning and not grades. I believed that lie, aggressively optimized for learning over grades and that was a huge mistake.
Several times I skipped doing boring unnecessary homework or going to a useless class to work on projects that would teach me more. I would routinely do things like skip class to go above and beyond on interesting projects.
Despite getting above a 90 on all of my projects and exams, I graduated with a 2.4. I would routinely have calls with potential employers where they would say "wow after talking to you we're really impressed with your knowledge of c.s. and the projects you've completed. Oh btw I didn't see your gpa on your resume, what was it? Oh, I'm sorry. We only take people who have a gpa about 2.5/3.0/3.5. but don't worry you seem super personable and smart I know you're going to find something".
Now I tell all of my younger siblings. Optimize for grades and that's the only thing that matters. You can always pick up a book but you'll never be able to fix your gpa. My 2.4 and my wife's 4.0 continue to influence our lives (albeit now much more mildly) 10 years later.
Charging accordingly.
Don't work for middle men, get direct clients.
Make friends
Help people
Oh and study
Id love to go C2C but finding clients seems really hard.
In all seriousness, I agree with you. However, I think some degrees are borderline "hobby-tier" - They're cool, but not very useful outside of personal enjoyment.
applied STEM will pay off for the investment. I still take college courses online after my Masters in CS. I really enjoy learning about humanities and arts at a cheaper CC during my free time.
Believe it or not, there are some skills you can pick up studying the humanities that will set you apart from your CS major peers. Being able to write and communicate clearly, for example, is pretty much a super power in most tech jobs.
Well other than finance, but you could argue that STEM is heavily mixed into that field of study (and its derivatives) as well (mathematics, technology, data science)
However a self taught programmer with a humanities degree can also get to the same position with some sweat equity.
Once at the position of software developer the person with the humanities degree takes off.
They've learned to write, they learned to talk and be communicative amongst friends and colleagues. Your job will let you learn as you go wrt to tech, but not as much with soft skills. where the stem grad is still that weird awkward guy who gets into arguments about pedantics, the humanities person is writing proposals and building a network.
The stem person needs to put in a lot more work on the soft skills they never learned, especially if they want to rise in the rankings, this is where the humanities person has that leg up
I took several upper-level humanities courses in college (almost enough to get a classics minor), but I don't really feel like they improved my ability to communicate/network in the office. in my experience, these courses teach the material and the skill of writing a very specific kind of formal research paper that doesn't have much to do with business or technical writing. while you don't directly use a lot of the concepts you learn in a CS degree, I find the technical background much more useful in my day-to-day work.
I took a bunch of art history courses that focused mostly on Asia while double majoring in STEM fields.
I'm a scientist, not a designer, but I do manage a team that includes designers. I often have to weigh in on certain design choices, and getting those choices right is often make/break for the project. The tools and skills I developed in art history courses are super helpful. As a manager or either people or product, these "soft" fields that intersect with anthro start providing a lot of value.
A good friend double-majored in music and has a similar opinion.
So, I would not recommend majoring exclusivity in an obscure humanity. But attending university without taking some upper-division humanities courses is probable a mistake.
Oh, and ignoring intro-level humanities courses is an even bigger mistake. SWEs who are weak coders can often be mentored. SWEs who can't write or communicate well are pretty much a lost cause.
It be an interesting study to look at universities that offer both tracks.
Take Columbia University that where one can earn a BSE in CS from the school of engineering, or one can earn a BA from columbia college. where the students are taking many of the same "core" CS classes, but the engineering students have a larger CS course load, while the BA students have a larger humanities course load.
I'm sure there are other universities that have similar setups where one can get similar degrees with different course load emphasis.
Not sure I agree about liberal arts colleges writ large. The tippy-top tier are pretty great. But the ones in our region have... eclectic... CS faculty. Random math phds and early retirement from industry types. Entire departments taken together have single digit H-indices. I'm sure they're great teachers and all, but...
$25K+/yr for the same sort of de facto non-academic retired/shifted-from-industry instructors you can get at any coding bootcamp or community college is robbery. Especially when the state school next door is about the same price and has a real faculty still pushing the edges of the field.
Really? I feel exactly the opposite, especially for CS. How do you become a good writer without feedback from a good writer (or, at least, critical reader)?
In particular, the popular and effective Moore method of teaching math relies heavily on interaction with other students.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore_method
>[T]he content of the course is usually presented in whole or in part by the students themselves. Instead of using a textbook, the students are given a list of definitions and theorems which they are to prove and present in class, leading them through the subject material.
Software developers have to communicate with our co-workers and write documents continually anyway so it's not much additional effort to observe the clarity, effectiveness and persuasiveness of what one is writing or even solicit feedback. You also get to observe colleagues and leaders who are good (or not) at writing and learn from their output. Being a competent communicator becomes more or less a requirement as one rises through the ranks, for both managers and senior technical individual contributors, so it's best to make a virtue out of necessity and hone your writing skills in the workplace.
Those people are usually stuck as juniors without formal education because they’re not at the point where self-teaching is possible.
Ymmv
If they're that poorly educated, then they'll be floundering in college humanities courses too so I'm not sure how that's a counterargument. Spending credit-hours on remedial English courses is even worse value for money.
[1] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/cultural-gender-studies [2] https://datausa.io/profile/cip/computer-science
The problem here really isn't unmarketable degrees. It's low wage jobs that require college-educated workers.
Also - in my subjective opinion as someone who has been in the workforce for nearly 20 years: that Gender Studies student is going to be a better writer than the STEM major with a B.S. Too often they barely capable of professional writing. 90% of the good technical writing I see is done by less than 10% of the engineers. And the best writing I see is from the self-taught people who got a History major or something like that. Being able to produce a 100-level college paper is just table stakes.
To me gender studies in particular seems to be an overly specific field to warrant such a high number (comparatively). I'm also very suspicious of its implementation (and I say that reluctantly as a feminist).
That said, I think there is huge value in philosophy/ethics but also in history and social sciences.
We need more smart, scientifically minded people studying these things globally and generating results, because we suffer from a severe lack of meaning and rational discourse.
To me it seems like half-baked ideology, fundamentalism, religion, cynical propaganda and tribalism are suppressing the advancement and refinement of our value systems and the resulting long-term goals of our societies.
While today's youth and intellectuals are squabbling over superficial things like gender pronouns, the powerful greedily disregard their responsibilities (at best) in the name of self interest. They're not only ignoring the consequences but actively try to discredit everything that gets in their way, even scientific fact, without repercussion!
People are still getting, murdered, mutilated and enslaved/oppressed and nature is starting to beat down hard on everyone, while the media and politics only further the divide and stir unrest by fighting over attention.
What value systems do we have today? Many base theirs still on provably toxic, incoherent and cynical ideologies like Marxism, Neo-Liberalism, Nationalism, Imperialism, Social Relativism, religion and so on. And in the middle we have a huge gaping "meh": An unreflective hodgepodge of tribalistic, after-the-fact values resulting in a pessimistic, regressive mindset: full of conservative nay-saying and hostile cancel-culture.
None of this is good enough and I feel like we are not advancing, but regressing. And none of this is solved by having more CS graduates who end up tuning the knobs on some ERP-system, analyzing customer data or building marketing websites.
I used to be the sponsor of an intern program and I'd say based on my experience is that, like anything else, ymmv with programs. One of the schools that I used to get folks from have a very good English, History, Caribbean Studies, and African Studies program, and the students are awesome. Some of the other programs have lower standards or are less mature, (or are landing zones for people who wash out of things) and the students suffer for it.
This happens for all things though. At my alma mater, the Business school was a recruiting funnel for big-5 accountants had a strict GPA requirement. So the frat boys and others would squeak out with an Economics degree. At another school, the Classics department was fossilized and core classes were solely graded on a bunch of multiple choice exams virtually unchanged for 30 years... you can imagine what type of student is attracted to that.
I majored in English, which has been at least as helpful in my career as my CS classes.
I majored in Creative Writing and interdisciplinary (politics, philosophy, and economics) studies. Currently working as an applied AI researcher and about to go back to get my phd in AI as well. There are many paths to take. Often being different helps you stand out. Having a humanities and social science background is just as important and useful as a strong tech and quantitative background.
My first tech job, I was the only English major in the candidate pool. Turns out being able to communicate well and being articulate is also super useful.
Would you say that intelligence is ...artificial?
I went to a vocational school high school in a underprivileged community where college was not reality for most students( < 30% of student went to college). I dropped out of CS in undergrad because I lacked basic math skills most students have. My career path was IT analyst -> project manager -> data scientist -> applied AI. It took about ten years of self study, work, and some luck to get to where I am today. And I am nowhere near done learning and growing (hence going back for a phd at 32).
For many their paths will be non-linear especially if they come from underprivileged backgrounds. I had a colleague who went back to do his undergrad at 29 after work 10 years as line chef and found success in his mid thirties.
It's problematic that we conflate price for value and that the purpose of college is career training. Ideally college would be free or heavily subsidized like it is in many other countries.
A strong liberal arts training is valuable in producing a more educated populace. For me, coming from a small community, my biggest fear was being stuck working at my terrible high school. The main value of college for me was imagination. Being able to imagine myself not confined by my circumstance was far more impactful in my life than many of the marketable skills that I picked along the way.
I strongly feel that path is only an affordable luxury if you come from a upper middle class background and up. Most people can't afford to experiment with higher education given its high monetary cost. You guys might not agree, but qzx_pierri has a point.
But I agree that it is harder to take risks coming from a low-income background where the cost of bad choices is amplified. Risk taking is risky though. That's the tragedy, it's hard to escape your social location incrementally. But at the same time for each success story there are many that don't succeed whose stories we don't hear.
I usually tell students to double major (or minor) if they are privileged to go to college. We as a society have moved away from the idea of renaissance person who has experience in many disciplines towards hyper-specialization. It makes it hard to adapt when everything around you is bound to change.
We moved away from that because higher education has gotten exponentially more expensive. I'm sure there are some valid reasons for that (e.g. increasing graduate student TA pay?) as well as terrible ones (e.g. an increase in both administrative execs along with administrative exec pay), but that's what's directly hurting the motivation for experimentation. Only the well-to-do have that privilege now. For others, it's risk and not harmless experimentation.
In some other parts of the world, it is considered meaningful to learn a subject because one is passionate about it, and therefore is not a "waste of life".
Additionally, consider that some non-STEM degrees may produce trained thinkers (e.g. philosophy), which may turn to STEM careers in an indirect way; I've witnessed this on both sides - employees (careers) and employers (hiring).
> only 29.7 per cent of employed individuals in Ontario with bachelor’s degrees or higher in engineering were working as engineers or engineering managers.
> A further 37 per cent worked in professional positions that normally require a university degree.
> Those who were not working as engineers and were working in positions that don’t necessarily require a degree made up fully 33.3 per cent of the total.
In other words, there are more people with engineering degrees who work in jobs not requiring any degree at all, than there are people working in engineering.
Source: https://www.ospe.on.ca/public/documents/advocacy/2015-crisis...
A good life requires so many different elements, but mostly comes down to one thing: what you put into it, esp. in regards to improving the lives and welfare of others around you. Do this, and you will find that your own life gets better and better. Be kind, do work to help others, care about people and their lives (and not just your own) and you'll find that life will turn out pretty darn fine.
https://www.entrepreneur.com/article/233578
"The only major personality trait that consistently leads to success is conscientiousness."
I was offering an easy answer to the confused wondering of the Atlantic article. The path to success is known. Apparently not as well known as I would have thought. No need to point to the fact that the heterogeneous mess of a "College Degree" as being not a factor.
Yes, there's lots of ways to not succeed. Why not do a very little bit of shallow research and shout out to the roof tops what actually does work?!
https://talkpoverty.org/2015/12/17/american-dream-zip-codes-...
We had a computer lab with 8 Apple II's in my public elementary school in 1983. We also had a few TRS-80s.
But lack of things and capital will never get you a good life. If you are starving, no matter what you put in or how kind you are to others, you cannot have a good life. If you are home insecure, you cannot have a good life. Period.
I'm going to define "good life" to mean food, housing, and health security.
While you're right that nothing is guaranteed, the wealthier you are, the more you can guarantee these basic needs.
Even me, being in tech making around 6 figures, I haven't achieved my definition of a good life. This is because if I lose my job, the basic needs I listed cannot be maintained.
However, if you do not need to work (i.e. CEOs, billionaires, etc.), you are more likely to have your basic needs for a good life met for the rest of your life even if you lose your "job". What I'm trying to say is that having things and lots of capital can very much get you to my aforementioned definition of a "good life".
I think we're getting ahead of ourselves with these philosophical questions of what a "good life" is. First, let's meet everyone's basic needs: food, housing, and health. Because those needs are clearly not met.
Starvation is a problem for Africa, not the USA.
The US is huge, some people would have to hitchhike quite far to get to a high-traffic area. There's also no guarantee of receiving any handouts at all, so I'm not sure I'd use the word "easily" (or even "possible"). And after hitchhiking and begging all day, praying for a few bucks to buy rice, you're not actually going to want to buy rice. You're going to want alcohol, or something fatty and sugary, or just plain drugs.
Your framing of this problem trivializes a terrible, dehumanizing experience, and is out of touch with the reality of the impoverished middle-American.
- the rice cooker
- electricity to cook the rice
- potable water for the rice
- storage containers for the leftover rice
- refrigeration or other means of preserving the prepared food
- a secure place to store your month's food supply from other hungry people and/or cleaners
- mental health while you eat the same plain rice with bare your hands for a month and society judges you for "not pulling yourself up by your bootstraps."
You can make all the excuses you want, but nobody is dying of starvation in the USA. The number of annual starvation deaths in the US is so small we don't even track it, and the people that do die of starvation aren't starving because they are poor, but sick (i.e. cancer makes them stop eating).
I'm not advocating a plain rice diet 24/7. I'm just saying calories are so cheap in America that obesity is a bigger problem for the poor than starvation.
Furthermore, even the poorest in the US have access to the things in your list if they want them.